Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga
Yesterday, Marine Le Pen, a French politician sometimes called a (female) French Trump and once called the Devil's daughter, was convicted in France of embezzling EU funds in the early 2000s. She is to be sentenced to house arrest for two years, and barred from politics for five.
The significance? That takes her out of the next presidential election, in 2027, where she is the current front runner.
The other problem?
When the original sentencing judge says Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally, 'embezzling' may have the wrong connotations. The judge who made the ruling preferred a 'democratic bypass that deceived parliament and voters.'
How does this lead to a leading political candidate getting imprisoned and disqualified in a leading western democracy?
Oh boy. This is a long one.
TL;DR: Banal political corruption insinuations ahead. And more. And more. Bless your innocent hearts if you have high trust in government, and don't be surprised if what follows starts to echo in your culture war interpretations in the months and years to come.
Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of plentiful citations, and some things that can only be noted with an eyebrow. Which is to say- some pretty hefty suspicion of impropriety, in ways that aren't exactly public record. However, if you want to believe that all governments are innocent unless proven guilty, by all means. Be ye warned.
What is this scandal?
It's more of a funding-code issue that results when you deliberately overlap organizational interests but establish conditionals that can be used as gotchas depending on whether the anti-fraud office wants to pursue.
EU funding for european political parties is normal. The overlap between national parties and EU political parties (Members of European Parliament, or MEP) is normal. The transition between national parties and nominally distinct EU parties is normal. Money is fungible. Even political aids are fungible- an aid who helps in one respect of a politician's work load enables the politician to work on others.
What Le Pen is charged / guilty of is that EU MEP party-member funds were used for someone who was working for Le Pen, the National Party leader, rather than Le Pen, the MEP party leader. Part of the basis of this claim is where there aid worked from- MEP assistants getting EU funds are supposed to work from / near the EU parliament, but around 20 of Le Pen's aides worked from France. As a result, they did not qualify for the funds they drew for being an aid to MEP-Le Pen, since Le Pen's MEP-aids are supposed to be geographically bounded.
Hence, embezzlement. Did the aids help with MEP work from France? Not actually relevant. Did the aids enable Le Pen to better focus on her MEP duties, as was the purpose of the money-for-aides? Also not particularly relevant.
What gives the saga more backstory, and scandal potential for those who think it's a gotcha, is that it's part of a much, much longer multi-decade saga.
Who is Le Pen?
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean Le Pen, her father who founded the party. In short, he was the political outsider / far rightist / probable fascist sympathizer / possible nazi sympathizer, or at least dismisser, who was absolutely hated by the French political establishment. He's the guy who's synonymous with the National Front, unrepentant French far-right of the post-WW2 variety .
One of the key notes of Le Pen is that he ran the National Front like a family business... not successfully. Whether by purely coincidental mismanagement, personal bilateral animosity with French industry, or possibly indirect state pressures after the National Front's surprise and embarrassing showing in the 2002 presidential election, the National Front had some troubled finances.
And by troubled finances, I mean that by 2010 the French Government was progressively revoking the government's political party stipend that made up a plurality of its funding, even as Jean Le Pen was unable to get bank loans from French banks and unable to find a buyer for the 10-to-15 million Paris HQ to raise funds in 2008.
Where does the money come in?
The financial situation is where Marine Le Pen really enters in earnest. Marine Le Pen was given control of the party by her father in 2010. This was notably after she had already entered the European Parliament for over a half decade. Marine Le Pen was a MEP from 2004 to 2017, which is to say she inherited the National Front- and its financial issues- when she was already a MEP with no particular issue.
Marine's political priorities in the early 2010s was the rehabilitation of the National Front as a party. In 2013, she was still being called the Devil's Daughter by publications by the Atlantic. In 2018, this was when the National Front became the National Rally.
But the other part of Le Pen's job was to right the fiscal ship to keep the party viable. This is why across the 2010s Marine Le Pen was seeking foreign bank loans from abroad, including from US banks. This was where the Russia bank loan line of attack starts, since it was a Russian bank in 2014 that ultimately ended the credit embargo, but also saw Le Pen adopt a more pro-Russia rhetorical position. This challenge / options for loans has endured, and is why Le Pen more recently got a loan from Hungary in 2022.
So, to restate- Marine Le Pen was a reasonably-long-standing MEP in the 2000s with no major alleged issues at the time. In 2010, she took control over the national front. At this time, the NF was in financial distress.
This is the context where the misuse of European funds arose.
The Start of the Scandal
The Marine Le Pen allegations arose in Feb 2015, when European Parliament President Martin Shulz, a German MEP, raised complaints against her. Le Pen's party promptly counter-accused one of Shulz's own aids of a similar not-in-the-right-location violation. This didn't exactly get anywhere, because as noted at the time-
Machmer explained that one of Schulz’s assistants organizes study trips for a local branch of the SPD, but said this was “in his spare time, for free, because it is his hobby.”
Remember: it's embezzlement if you take EU money and work for the party. It's not embezzlement if you voluntarily do national party work for free as a hobby.
Who was Martin Schulz?
Well, in 2014, the year before he initiated the Le Pen allegations were made, Schulz was generally considered a bit... lacking in ethical enforcement. He was one of the European leaders who may / may not have turned a bit of a blind eye to notorious Malta corruption. After his time in the EU parliament, he made a brief but ambitious play in german power politics as the actual head of the German SDP in the 2017 German election. He lost to Merkel, of course, but so do they all. But he had the ambition to try, and had a history of building favors and friends.
But back to the earlier 2010s for a moment. Besides being President of the European Parliament at the time, he was a member of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. He was also a (clearly important) member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, i.e. part of the key governing coalition which itself is part of the Franco-German alliance that is the heart of the EU. Schulz was in the running for being the German foreign minister following the 2017 German election,, which might have some relevance to foreign relation implications with France.
Why does Martin Schulz matter?
Why does this party orientation possibly matter?
Because in 2015, the President of France, Francoise Hollande, was a French Socialist. Unsurprisingly, French Socialists tend to caucus well with the European socialists in the European parliament, though party politics being what it is I'll just ask you believe me on that.
Did they get alone? It's hard to say. But in May 2015, just a few months after the le Pen allegations were leveraged, Hollande was among the heads of state awarding Schulz the Charlemagne prize 2015. The Charlemagne prize is bestowed to those who have advanced european unification, which means as much or as little as you think it means. Typically it's an insider's appreciation award for strengthening European Union politics, which is to say strengthening the Franco-German influence on the continent because that is, in most practical respects, what EU centralization entails.
More relevant was that Schulz's very diplomatic interest in working with French rose above partisan politics, such as his notably high-profile willingness in 2017 to work with Macron, the current (but currently troubled) French president whose political fortunes have gotten a bit better with Le Pen's disqualification.
Would a German politician-
- with a spotty ethical record
- who stood to personally benefit
- from a political favor
- to the ideologically-aligned current French president
- or the subsequent french president
- who they might closely work with in their post-EU political career
-ever leverage a politically motivated ethics complaint against a MEP with a decade of non-complaints, over an issue that they themselves might be guilty of?
Heavens no, that's absurd.
Ahem. Sorry. Back to 2017 for a minute?
2017: Enter Macron
2017 is when Macron enters the Le Pen tale, since the 2017 election is what established them as rivals.
The 2017 French elections were notable for that they benefited both Macron and Le Pen as anti-establishment candidates. The election saw the collapse of the French establish right and left, and while that left a vacuum for Macron, it also benefited Le Pen. Macron ultimately won by the French firewall when the French socialist-left voted for him and against Le Pen, but it was historically remarkably close.
What was also remarkable is that Macron's party position has gotten worse over time. His party did very poorly in the 2020 municiple elections, though this was more a collapse of his left than a rise to Le Pen on the right. Macron pulled out another win in the 2022 election, where Le Pen, again, made it to the final round after a stronger-than-most showing.
This creates a certain... shall we say complication for the 2027 election, because Macron can't run for re-election in 2027, and he's known to not like that. Macron managed to beat Le Pen twice- was arguably the only person who could have- but the 2027 election would see him leave the stage and Le Pen be... well, a clear leading candidate, if by no means a guarantee.
Unless, of course, the judicial block-out is coincidentally underway even before the 2022 election is over.
And starting in a way that is- coincidentally- convenient for Macron's re-election.
2022: The Year the Scandal Returns In A Most Convenient Way
Five years after Macron takes the presidency, and nearly 7 after the Le Pen EU funding scandal starts, it returns in ways whose implications to the surrounding context become a bit clearer if you lay out relative dates of events. (Most of these dates are in the above al jazeera link.)
11 March 2022: The European Anti-Fraud Office provides the French prosecutor's office it's report on Le Pen.
Clearly the French government was taken by total surprise, and had no hand or insight into this EU process delivering this package.
12 March - 9 April 2022: No mention of or publicity is given to this report in most media. As such, no voters are aware of the duplicitious deception of French voters by a former MEP for whom this is an old scandal, forgotten scandal from over half a decade prior.
Which might have been slightly topical, given that...
10 April 2022: The first round of the French Presidential Election occurs.
After the French government sits on the report for a month, Le Pen places strong but somewhat distant second place, out-performing some expectations and underperforming others. 28% Macron, 23% Le Pen. The third-place runner up, and thus the potential second-round candidate party is a leftist party that garnered... 22%.
Which is to say, the French Prosectors really did Le Pen a favor by keeping that potentially embarrassing and undemocratic revelation a secret! Why, if she hadn't made it to the second round, Macron would have faced a broadly united left against him rather than for him in the name of the anti-le pen firewall!
It's a good thing that this virtuous adherence to principle applied for the rest of the campa-
17 April 2022: French prosecutors announce the new (actually old) Le Pen fund appropriation report
Coincidentally, 17 April 2022 was a Sunday, meaning this would be one of the opening media report for the next week's media cycle.
24 April 2022: The second round of the French Presidential Election occurs. Macron wins, 58% to 42%.
Fortunately, Macron's presidential margins are great! Any effects from the timing of the report probably had no result on a 16% gap.
June 2022: Unfortunately, Macron's parliamentary margins in the June 2022 elections are dismal, as his party loses control of the parliament and Le Pen's party gains 81 seats to become a key power player in government (in)stability for the next year and a half.
July 2022-February 2023: No particular action or movement is made on the Le Pen case. Nominally this is when the French prosecutors are developing their case, but given the substantial prior awareness in practice the case remains where it was since between rounds 1 of the election: available as a basis of future prosecution if and when desired.
The key point of 2022 is that the Le Pen scandal resurfaced coincidentally in time to shape the 2022 Presidential Election, where it was sat on when it might have hindered Le Pen's ability to get to the second round, but publicized right at a time to maximize Macron's electoral margins. Afterwards, it was further sat on until future timeliness.
2023 - 2024: A series of Correlating Progressions
March 2023: After Macron does the eternally popular thing of cutting welfare in the name of reform, the Macron government (in the legislature) comes less than a dozen votes from falling in a no confidence vote after Le Pen's party largely votes for no confidence.
June 2023: After about a year of political paralysis and parliamentary instability, a Macron ally who totally likes him for real guys raises the prospect of amending French constitution to give Macron third term. This totally-not-a-trial-balloon proposal flops like something that has no life.
October 2023: Just kidding about before, Macron makes a personal call for constitutional amendment for a third term.
8 December 2023: The French government announces Le Pen's trial will start in March 2024.](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231208-french-prosecutores-order-le-pen-to-stand-trial-in-eu-funding-scandal)
20 December 2023: Le Pen does the unforgivable, and gives Macron a 'kiss of death' by forcing him to compromise on immigration legislation in return for support. This actually triggers an internal party rebellion for Macron. Unrelated, establishment French media wonder how Macron will manage Le Pen's ever-rising rise.
The 20 December events aren't particularly causal in the process, but are amusing context.
The more relevant point of 2023 is that Macron's decision to prosecute Le Pen, an act which would bring favor from the French establishment, comes amidst his very unpopular bid to extend his time in office, which would require support from the French establishment. At this time, the Macron administration adopts a Tough-on-Le Pen position of 10 years- a period of time that would easily take her out of two elections- that will later be taken down to two years out of [insert choice here].
Also notable in the August 2023 initiation of prosecution of that it is both a starting block for the timer, and all future events. Whether there needed to be a 7-month gap between the announced intent to prosecute and the trial or not, had the prosecution train been started seven months earlier- during the large gap after the 2022 elections- then the future 2-year house arrest would have by consequence ended before, rather than probably after, the 2027 election. An 18-month bar, for other cases, would have been even less likely have a presidential election impact... had that been desirable.
2024: The Trial of Political Opponents with Absolutely No Political Parallels Or Impacts Elsewhere
March 2024: The Trial of Le Pen starts, about 24 months after the French government received an EU report of the 2015 report nearly 108 months prior. Truly the gears of French justice turned as fast as they could.
These are completely unrelated. Just because three major democracies of mutually-sympathetic ruling parties had parallel legal cases against leading opposition parties that threatened incumbent interests, and just because they did so on similar narrative themes/justification sof protecting democracy and rule of law themes, does not mean there was any sort of wink or nod or feeling emboldened by the example of others. Every case was independently moved forward on its own merits, with monetary judgements appropriate to the severity, and the mutual commentary by the states on the other's prosecutions was exactly what you would expect.
Also also coincidentally, this happened to be timed to roughly the same time that a UK court not only rejected a Trump lawsuit over the Steele dossier that was the root of the Russiagate hoax, but ordered Trump to pay 6-figures in legal fees, which was helpfully noted as adding to the half-billion in legal fees Trump had accrued so far that year and not at all contributing to pressures or efforts to drive Trump into bankruptcy analogous to the Le Pen experience earlier in the experience. Note that was before the historically unprecedented further half-billion fine from the New York judgement.
Now, admittedly, the Trump fiscal correlation must be a total distraction. Reputable democracies do not try to bankrupt their oppositions out of politics, and France failed to force Le Pen into fiscal insolvency years ago. The French government would only seek a 300,000 euro fine against Le Pen. And a 2 million euro fine against her party. And opened up a new case in September 2024 alleging illegal financing of the 2022 election.
This, clearly, is utterly unrelated to any other aspect of handling the Le Pen case, and not the initiation for a future basis to further fine and disqualify Le Pen from politics in the future after the current judgement runs its course.
And returning to the only relevant case itself, Le Pen trial that began in March in turn would certainly have no impact on...
June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?
July 2024: It, uh, doesn't work. Le Pen's party gets about 1/3 of all votes, and about 13% more than Macron's party.
The snap elections are generally considered a strategic mistake for Macron, doubling-down on his issues.
They also, coincidentally, totally kill any talk of Macron's constitutional reform for a third term candidacy.
A candidacy that- remembering previous elections- would have been substantially improved with a Le Pen in the field to rally a resentful Left to his side.
But now that Macron's political hopes for a third election are dead and buried...
November 2024: The French Government announces it seeks 5 years in jail, on top of the political bar, for Le Pen. However, conflicting reports say 2 years., with judgement expected in march 2025
Notably- even a 2 year sentence from vaguely April 2025 to April 2027 would release Le Pen right on / after the 2027 election, and thus totally unable to compete. And, depending on the terms of the house arrest, unable to speak or influence.
31 March 2025 (Yesterday): Le Pen is sentenced to 4-but-2-if-she-behaves years of prison, 2 of them under house arrest and 2 suspended, and a five year bar from political office. She is allowed to appeal but...
Even if she does appeal the ban on public office, only an appellate ruling could overturn it and restore her hopes of running, although time is running out for that to happen before the election as appeals in France can take several years to conclude.
Gallic shrug
I am sure the French government that took a decade to bring this conviction about will speedily process the appeal of the Le Pen who recent French polling suggested was somewhere in the 40% voting range for the first round. (Usual French first round poling disclaimers abound.)
Functionally, this ruling conveniently clears the deck for France's nominal establishment left and rights to make a return, without Le Pen in the way.
Call it Macron's farewell gift to French democracy. It's not like he disqualified his own presidential election opponent...
...though that's more because he failed to get the constitutional change he wanted that would have allowed him to run again...
...in which case, perhaps prosecutorial discretion might have leaned another way.
Summing It All Up
Le Pen (Senior) was an all-around tosser and more or less enemy of the French establishment, if not the French State per see
- Le Pen (Senior) embarrassed the French Establishment in the early 2002 election where he made the second round of the presidential election
- Le Pen (Senior) thereafter suffered years of unfortunate financial prospects that would have driven the Le Pen party out of politics
- Misfortune including perfectly neutral reductions in state stipends for political parties, a bank blockade, and an inability to sell a multi-million dollar property in Paris
- Le Pen (Senior) is politically toxic, and fiscally insolvent, before his daughter takes over the party
Le Pen (Marine) is Le Pen's daughter who inherited his mess, and his enemies
- Le Pen was an unexceptional MEP for over a decade with no notable scandals or accusations of fraud of this sort at the time
- In 2011, Le Pen inherits the party, and its finances, from her father. Money is tight.
- During this time, and probably before, Le Pen deals in the technically-illegal-but-totally-not-widely-practiced practice of paying national party members with EU funds.
- No one cares.
- Le Pen spends the next years working to rebuild fiscal solvency, including taking foreign loans to break the Parisian bank blockade
- The foreign loan most in question is Russian, marking a turn towards a more Russian-friendly narrative line, and increased institutional and international suspicion
President of European Parliament Shulz was a totally-not-corrupt German politician who totally didn't do a political hit job on the rival of an ally in furtherance of his own political ambitions
- Schulz had a notable, internationally-reported reputation for corruption, including on a similar issue
- The issue that will be the basis of the scandal is, uh, not unknown in his circles
- Schulz takes a particular stab at the political rival of a major political partner
- and potential future diplomatic partner who could help Schulz's ambitions come true
- Schulz definitely doesn't get awarded for services rendered for French-appreciated interests
- Or eagerly try to sustain the relationship with surprise arrival Macron
- But Schulz is not the villain
- Merely the tool providing the French establishment their means to prosecute Le Pen when desired
President Macron was totally not letting Le Pen stay in politics as a foil to bolster his personal electoral prospects against the French left
- It's not like Le Pen automatically invoked the support of the French left in every second round election
- Or bolstered his parliamentary prospects against the left that would, absent her, happily no-confidence him
- Or that his administration hid scandalous information that might have let her fail to be the foil when his left flank was weak
- It just takes an additional half-decade to complete investigations to find prosecutable evidence of something that was recorded and reported on more than half a decade prior
- You know, to develop the case until the time is right
Macron was totally not prolonging the case management by months or years in parallel to anticipation of extending his own political career
- Extending his jupiter-style presidency to a third term would have been more unpopular than he was
- In which case a free Le Pen sure would have been useful for those second-round elections
- But keep her and her party in a slow boil post-2022 with unclear intentions or scope
- As insurance policy, or leverage on the parliamentary politics
But Macron's efforts to garner support for a constitutional amendment failed
- And Macron's snap election gambit to regain control of government failed
- And when it failed, so did his prospects at constitutional change
- And if he's not running again, there's no electoral advantage in Le Pen to run again
Which makes it naturally the best time to announce the intent to jail and disqualify the clear frontrunner
- A merciful 'mere' 2 years house arrest just coincidentally scheduled to time to the next election cycle
- It certainly could not have occurred earlier, and thus mitigated the perception of intentional procedural manipulation
- This is justified because embezzlement of EU funds is a critical subversion of democracy the voters should know about
- Just not when it might have harmed Macron's electoral prospects
- Or by letting voters vote accordingly against Le Pen with the knowledge
In Conclusion
Is there a 'benign' explanation for all this? Sure, if you want.
Is this a sketchy-but-will-be-claimed-above-reapproach series of events? Also yes.
The Le Pen saga doesn't actually require some all-encompassing conspiracy. La Pen (Senior) can have his own political feuds with the French establishment separate from La Pen (Marine). Schulz was a means, but hardly the start or the end of the Le Pen family feud with the French establishment. Macron was (probably) never involved in the early phases of whatever French state pressures may or may not have been used to try to bankrupt the Le Pen party.
But unless you believe the French prosecutor's office is completely independent of Macron and only coincidentally schedules things to align with electoral milestones and key dates to Macron's benefit, the Macron-era Le Pen saga has plenty of its own implications of, shall we say, politically considerate handling.
And those Macron handlings were built on a history of the Marine Le Pen handlings. And the Marine Le Pen handlings were built on the Le Pen (Senior) handlings. This has been a political fight for longer than some of the posters on this forum have been alive.
None of this means that Le Pen didn't actually 'defraud' the EU of however many manhours of political aid hours she charged the EU. If that's all you care about, this can be 'just,' sure. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, and all that.
But the other part of 'just' is if this is handled the same as other cases. And to an extent this is impossible, because no one else in France gets handled like Le Pen, because no one else represents what the Le Pen family represents, or threatens, to the French establishment.
What Next?
Don't be surprised if this becomes a significant reoccurring propaganda / european culture war theme for the anti-establishment skeptics, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Establishment European media are already signaling an expectation of further political chaos in France, and trying to coax/signal Le Pen to 'help her party' over 'seek revenge.' (Politico) The National Rally remains in position to topple the government by contributing to a no-confidence vote if the other parties oppose Macron.
The New York Times, which is broadly sympathetic to the French government effort and hostile towards Le Pen with the NYT's characteristic framing devices, concedes that-
Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure.
This is surrounded by all the appropriate signals that this is bad thought, of course, but it is unlikely to be solely an American critique. Various right-of-center politicians across Europe were quick to condemn, and the culture war lines will write themselves.
Not all are unhappy or afraid, though.
In Paris’ Republic Plaza, where public demonstrations often unfold, Le Pen detractors punched the air in celebration.
“We were here in this square to celebrate the death of her father,” said Jean Dupont, 45, a schoolteacher. “And this is now the death of Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and a figure long associated with racism and Holocaust denial, died earlier this year at age 96.
Sophie Martin, 34, a graphic designer, was among those in a celebratory mood. “I had to check the date — I thought it was April Fool’s Day,” she said. “But it’s not. She’s finally been knocked down. We’ve lived with her poison in our politics for too long.”
A Game of Chairs (At Columbia University)
or
How Trump Defeated Columbia University Columbia University Defeated Itself
The Intelligencer, a generally left-leaning American media outlet of the sort to still refer to anti-Trump actors 'the Resistance,' released a long-but-interesting report on many of the internal dynamics of the road to Columbia University's rise to prominence in the US culture war in the last year or so.
A (brief) recap for this year is that Trump Administration's suspended 400 million in grants and contracts on grounds of Civil Rights Act violations (namely anti-semitism related to Gaza War protests). Columbia's public acceptance of the Trump administration terms for restoring funding was under cut the then-President downplaying any impacts from the Federal agreement in a private faculty meeting.
As the strikethrough sub-title implies, the proximal cause, and political attribution that author (or editor) wants you to take away, is that Trump defeated Columbia. The not-so-deep subtext that is more interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is how the Columbia internal politics sabotaged set the stage.
TLDR: Columbia is currently in an unstable leadership vacuum because of how the university distributed internal administrative powers to students and faculty, how a key (but controversial) past President consolidated power in the office of the president rather than the senate, and how the Board attempted to mitigate/reform the Presidential power centralization led to leaders who were unprepared with the politics of the Gaza War. Would-be ambitious university faculty who tried to take advantage did not help.
This is presented because (a) the Columbia dynamics exposed may help people understand the dynamic of 'marching through institutions' across leadership generations, and (b) rabbit holes be fun to share.
///
The Nature of the Columbia Governance Problem
Even by the cats-in-a-bag standard of modern research universities, Columbia is a cursed place to govern. It’s huge, with 17 schools to manage, and its endowment is the second smallest in the Ivy League on a per-student basis, after Cornell. There’s never enough funding, which means Columbia has an extra-toxic version of a common university problem: resentment between the liberal-arts programs, which are prestigious and lose money, and the cash-cow units that subsidize them.
Two don't-call-it-foreshadowing notes here.
1: Remember that money is fungible.
2: Keep track of which department is offering praise or criticism.
(A) Root of the Problem
Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured history. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over five buildings, the trustees made a big change to Columbia’s governance structure. They created a senate with a supermajority of faculty and students and gave it the power to oversee discipline and draft university policies. Over the decades, though, many of these delegated powers eroded, replaced by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper but not really in practice. It was a legitimacy bomb, waiting to go off in a crisis.
As a result of Vietnam War protests, Columbia delegated various institutional powers to a sub-body that gave faculty and students- but particularly faculty and students coordinating together- not just policy power, but disciplinary power.
Columbia Presidential Centralization
In 2002, after decades of financial struggles, the trustees installed Lee Bollinger as president, and he began to make the university bigger and more ambitious in almost every way. He seemed less interested in day-to-day academic management than in pushing Columbia into exciting new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary centers around the world. He developed a new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To accomplish this, Bollinger mostly bypassed the senate and his fractious faculties. It earned Bollinger a reputation as the greatest university president of his generation; it came at the cost of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated among deans and the president’s office each year showed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of people reported directly to the president, many of them floating off to the side, outside any recognizable hierarchy.
President Bollinger, 2002-2023, centralized administrative power in the office of the President, and sidelined the faculty/student senate institutions.
While not explicit, this is a two-fold basis of an anti-Presidential-deference institutional bias in the student-faculty senate. First, common grievance / loss of influence to bind teachers, and the students they can influence, seeking to regain influence. Second, and less obvious, that the President would decrease efforts to build/maintain a power coalition in the Senate that he does not need the assistance of... in favor of other, more directly influential, influence areas.
Bollinger Influence in the Columbia Board of Trustees
In his two decades leading Columbia, Bollinger outlasted more and more of the trustees, and he was able to shape the group in his image. “Lee basically seizes control,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over many years said. “If you’re a trustee, you can yell at your chief executive, but your only recourse is to fire him. And Lee basically would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you want to fire me? Go right ahead. Guess what? Manhattanville is still not done. And anyone whom you hire as a successor is not going to want to spend the first five years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”
Bollinger's influence matters because the Columbia Board of Trustees in power now is in a post-Bollinger transition. Because...
That spring [of 2024], Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.
Reframed- the current board of trustees is not only Bollinger-era, but were used to a stronger University President who was willing to sideline / ignore the student-and-faculty university senate.
But the recent presidents are not strong Presidents, in part by the Board's own design.
The Board Strikes Back
The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s economic position was fragile and that success had masked a worrying level of institutional rot. When Bollinger was finally ready to retire in 2023, the board replaced him with Shafik, then the president of the London School of Economics. That school was small and simple compared to Columbia, but Shafik was sophisticated and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political moment. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She would be Columbia’s first female president and its first of color. Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world while modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.
In 2023, the Bollinger-era board replaced Bollinger with a new, and more importantly, foreign and less experienced in Columbia politics, University President. Shafik was a 'can appeal to all interests' compromise. She had the the demographic aspects attractive to the liberal-art progressive wing, the economic background to recognize the role / relevance of the 'cash cow' departments, and for the board she was a deliberate break from the Bollinger-style president.
And she was aware of that from the start.
The night before her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner in the courtyard of the president’s house, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Street. In his later years, Bollinger had become notorious for conducting much of his business there and seldom appearing in his office. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s family toasting how they had “quite literally pulled back the curtains and let the light in.” From the perspective of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the school’s foundation. It would just take time.
And then history happened.
Shafik and the Gaza Conflict on Campus
For a moment, it was possible to think that Shafik was well equipped to lead Columbia through the aftermath of October 7. She had superb knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East: She had been involved in the Oslo peace process and written books about the economic possibilities of a regional accord. But her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, where debate and respect abound because you’re handing out money. Shafik had no experience of the Israel-Palestine issue as it played at Columbia and on the Upper West Side, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The university is home to both a large population of observant Jewish students and a cohort of professors who are avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. Those two groups were not going to wait for their new president to get up to speed.
The relevant point here isn't that the University had strong pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. The point here is that Shafik was personally involved in the peace process before, which- along with her deliberately non-Columbia Uni/foreign background that went into her hiring- shaped her (eventual) decision to allow New York Police onto the campus to arrest protestor encampments/occupations, after an April 2024 Congressional hearing. (This Columbia-centric hearing followed the disastrous 2023 Congressional hearing that led to the replacement of Harvard's president.)
Skipping forward just a bit for a relevant perspective from her-
Shafik headed back to New York [from the April 2024 Congressional hearing] on the Acela and decided to authorize the New York Police Department to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into an international media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her home later on asked why she’d brought in the cops. “She didn’t understand what it meant to call the NYPD,” the professor said. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry guns.” For her part, Shafik told faculty that anyone who imagined the protests could influence real-world events was delusional: In her World Bank days, when she’d sat in on actual peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, nobody had once mentioned a university.
So Shafik's lived experience- previously considered a virtue in her hiring- led to decisions that ultimately led to her ouster.
But there was more before then, which started the grounds by which the Trump Administration would later invoke the Civil Rights Act against Columbia.
The Rise of the Antisemitism Civil Rights Act Issue
Going back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before the Israeli ground incursion...
What happened in those first few weeks, before Israel’s formal counteroffensive, convinced many in the Jewish community that Columbia was home to irredeemably antisemitic faculty and students. One day after 10/7, the most prominent Palestinian advocate on the faculty, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada that called the Hamas operation “innovative,” “stunning,” “astonishing,” and “incredible.” On the second day, two student groups called for Columbia to divest from Israel and end its academic activity in Tel Aviv, where the university was planning to open a satellite campus. Soon, the first “From the river to the sea” chants were heard at protests. Students, faculty, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false because they showed their colors in this period, before the full invasion of Gaza.
For Shafik and others in university leadership, managing the torrent of activity was not just difficult but perhaps impossible. Every administrative action boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officials directed demonstrators toward separate exits. But that sent the pro-Palestinian side onto West 115th Street, headed toward the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. The problem was compounded when Jewish students there were locked inside, which several said made them feel unsafe.
This created 2 separate problems for pro-Palestinian institutional interests in Columbia against the office of the President, and the Board of Trustees more generally.
First, the divestment demand went against the Board's mandate for Shafik when they hired her, which is rarely helpful.
Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world
Particularly in the light of the 'liberal-arts are prestigious but unprofitable' tension. Spreading the brand is what allows subsidizing such.
Second, and worse, this created a Civil Rights Act violation risk if Columbia did not respond appropriately.
OCR also issued a notice (1994) that assists school communities in understanding their obligations under Title VI and discusses some considerations for schools when taking action to remediate a hostile environment under Title VI. The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI. When a school is taking action to remediate a hostile environment, just as when taking any other action, Title VI prohibits the school from discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
The 'or' is significant. A CRA hostile environment discrimination does not have to be created by the university. It is enough if you accept, tolerate, or leave uncorrected.
Additionally, anti-semitism is considered a violation of title VI CRA, but anti-anti-semitism is not, because the later is a political position, which is not a protected category, but antisemitism is considered an act against a protected category. This is Trump's fault.
In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand.
So. In the opening days following the October 7 2023 attack, a Columbia faculty member publicly praised the atrocity in glowing terms, campus protestors chanted slogan with known ethnic cleansing connotations, and at a University permitted protest, pro-Palestinian protestors ignored their designated deconfliction exit and instead mobbed a Jewish center and locked jewish students inside.
Also, later, unrepentent protestors did not help.
Back in the spring [2024], in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of the saga’s most objectionable characters, a student who had said “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” during his disciplinary hearing. Now, CUAD reversed that position and apologized to the student, writing that “where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” (CUAD took credit for organizing the May 7 disruption at Butler Library.)
Remember Title VI, and 'or left uncorrected.'
But back in April 24, Shafik went to Congress.
Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.
This probably did not help Shafik's position before Congress. It also may or may not have been predictable what the outcomes would be.
In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”
A second encampment formed spontaneously after the bust-up of the first. Protest leaders refused to meet with Shafik. Representatives from student government rendezvoused with her in a clandestine meeting in a basement, leaving their phones outside so nobody could make a recording, but there was no meaningful progress. Shafik authorized a second police raid to end the students’ takeover of Hamilton Hall and canceled commencement. The year was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her around campus on foot, concerned for her safety.
Shafik resorted to law enforcement against the encampments. During this times, student government- but also teacher government because the Senate is both student-and-teacher dominated- met with Shafik privately, even as protest leaders- presumably a different and 'unconnected' group- refused to meet her at all.
And this is when we get our next governance turnover.
The Board Intervenes (Again)
That spring, Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.
Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor.
If you want to take a guess on how many of these identified members are Jewish, have children on campus who are jewish, or otherwise close connections with jewish friends / family, feel free to look up for yourself. The answer is more than two. I only bring this up to note the only time the article actually specifies someone's Jewishness later.
The point now, however, is that the Board has a positional divide between 'anti-semitism is a big problem' and 'anti-semitism is a concern but is disingenuously used to stifle speech.'
The issue that Columbia ran into was that the protestors lost the Free Speech argument with the Bollinger-era board... despite Bollinger being a notable First Amendment advocate himself in his selections.
Or possibly because of his influence.
In April 2024, the New York Post painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”) But that doesn’t capture how the board behaved in private. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia as the Mendelson side did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a noted First Amendment scholar, had stocked the board with people who held expansive views on speech, yet in practice they found it difficult to side with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s policies on when and where demonstrations could occur. “It would have been easier for the First Amendment absolutists to defend the students if they had respected the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions,” a trustee told me.
This point here isn't that the pro-Palestinian protestors agitated their way into a losing argument, though they did. The point here is that the pro-Palestinian protestor advocates were running into the Civil Rights Act issue.
Columbia University had stated policies on time, place, and manner restrictions. These were pre-established, and pre-enforced, restrictions. Not equally enforcing them could become a form of favoritism contributing to, well, a Title VI hostile environment under the CRA.
However, the Board didn't come to a consensus as much as a consensus came with timely personnel turnover.
Antisemitism became the prevailing concern. In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said. During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.
A previous gridlock leads to an imbalance in favor of the clamp downs by the Board. However, the Board doesn't have all the formal power here.
Remember the root of the problem paragraph earlier?
The Student-Teach Senate Demands Control Over The Judicial-Disciplinary Process (And Gets It (Back))
Some trustees became obsessively focused on discipline and pushed Shafik to discuss individual students’ files in detail. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was also true that discipline was where Columbia was opening itself up to attack. Students’ cases were progressing slowly and uncertainly. The rules codified after 1968 established two tracks for students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Discipline, for issues like cheating on exams, and the University Judicial Board, for violations related to protest. The senate controlled who was appointed to the latter. But big demonstrations happened only every so often, and the group was convened haphazardly. Cases sometimes followed both tracks in parallel; other times, outside arbiters were called in. Administrators looked down on the Judicial Board because they were entitled to just one of its five seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted students and faculty. All this meant that after the October 7 attacks, Shafik routed discipline cases through a relatively new office that she controlled, the Center for Student Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony before Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the cases be run through its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the point, and the majority of cases related to the takeover of Hamilton Hall were transferred to the Judicial Board.
After the Vietnam War Protests, the (presumably then-anti-war Board of Trustees) gave students (and teachers) the right to sanction protest rule violators. However, this was rarely and haphazardly used.
In the aftermath of Oct 7, Shafik used an office that was created during the Bollinger era of centralizing power into the Presidency to handle protest issues.
After the (highly condemned by student and teacher protestors) start of enforcement, Shafik gives up institutional control of the disciplinary process back to the Student and Teacher-dominated senate. This may be partly out of a (doomed) compromise to stable the ship of office, but it is also consistent with Shafik and the Columbia Board of Trustee's desire to dis-empower the Bollinger-era president.
But what Shafik did on her way out the door isn't what mattered. What the Senate did not do was more relevant.
Months passed [without disciplinary progress]. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least able to get its house in order. “There’s some deep-rooted structural problems,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an internal group Columbia formed to document antisemitism and recommend reforms. “Everything was broken: the whole freaking administrative infrastructure of the university to deal with protest, the security, the disciplinary process. Why did it take us so long to get that discipline done? Because it was broken. There was nothing there.”
Remember Title VI.
The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI.
Shafik started in an environment where Columbia professors (and students) were encouraging a hostile environment, faced with clear speech policy and protest management violations that made non-action against violators a form of acceptance / toleration, and then handed off the disciplinary/correction process to an institution that did not work... after her predecessor had given her office the tools to take actions.
In August 2024, Shafik quit, in what was the then-shortest presidential tenure in more than 200 years.
Enter Katrina Armstrong: The Anti-Anti-Bollinger President
Katrina Armstrong, Shafik's successor, was picked from the in-house university leaders to be an anti-Shafik. Someone who was more familiar with Columbia politics, more sensitive to student interests, and, well...
...well, remember the departments praise and criticism are coming from.
Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to replace Shafik as acting president, she’d been running Columbia’s vast Irving Medical Center for two years, and she started to reassure people that the school was now in the ER or ICU and efforts were being made to stop the bleeding. She positioned herself as the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a history professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative role you can have” — told me that Armstrong would reply to his emails immediately: “I’ve never had that experience with any other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s instinct for telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. She helped freshmen move into their dorms, had dinner at the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Daily Spectator apologizing to students who felt “hurt” by the police raids.
Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped start a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was surprised when Armstrong reached out to him. “I thought, Oh, she’s smart,” he recalled. The two developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to signal whether campus was open or closed made the place feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, but she took the note and made a change. Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”
However- and forgive the paragraph separation- Armstrong was not as familiar with Israeli-Palestinian politics as she might (not) have been with institutional politics.
On another occasion, Armstrong called Bearman, who is Jewish, into her office and asked him to explain to her the divide within Jewish faculty — why some felt the school had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites while others considered the issue overblown, a smoke screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. At the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine just hadn’t been an issue her doctors and scientists bothered her with.
In other words: the Columbia Board of Trustees replaced an economist directly familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but insufficiency sensitive to the Columbia protests, with a doctor so unfamiliar with it (or inclined to play the part of ignorant) she had to ask the (it's important to note he's Jewish) Jewish professor who ousted her predecessor for being too hard on pro-Palestinian protestors why other Jewish faculty and students might perceive antisemitism.
The Gathering Enemy Action
A Republican blueprint for assailing higher education, with Columbia as its primary target, was coming together. In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand. At the end of October 2024, Republican staffers in the House released a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which relied on more than 40,000 pages of internal Columbia documents. The report is heavy-handed, but for those inclined to believe, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding ground for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the government can now drive a school into bankruptcy.
The 'how' to brankrupcy is another para that refers to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Max Eden. I don't feel the article characterizes it well, so link it for your own review.
However, the point is that financial interests were at risk was raised, and...
The Armstrong Denial
At Columbia, much of the leadership was in denial that an asteroid was heading their way. A group of alumni and faculty had recently formed the Stand Columbia Society, which had excellent back channels to administrators. The group worked up a detailed analysis of Columbia’s exposure to a hostile administration — $250 million in the short term, $3.5 billion in a worst-case scenario — and circulated it as a warning. According to Stand Columbia, senior administrators responded that the math was “cute” but far-fetched.
The Stand Colombia Society does not have much of a public facing position on politics in general. However, in March 2025 it did publish a (paywalled even on internet archive) position paper titled: Issue #037: No, the Endowment Cannot Be Used to “Fight Trump”
The public-facing summary is-
Recently, a new narrative has begun making its way around the higher education commentariat: that Columbia University should “use its $15 billion endowment to fight Trump.” It’s a tempting, feel-good slogan, but here’s the problem: this argument is financially illiterate, institutionally reckless, and strategically suicidal.
Pretty strong words. But why might interim president from the medical center have dismissed even a 'mere' quarter-billion million short-term threat?
Because there could be a bigger-than-that short-term windfall incoming, if Armstrong played her professional self-interest cards right.
Armstrong's Nine-Figure Gamble for the (Columbian) Presidency
The false sense of security may have been encouraged by the common view that Armstrong’s tenure was going well. Most people who interacted with her at the time got the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a formal basis. There was, however, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an otherwise bleak year for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million gift to the medical school. They were enthusiastic fans of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complex. But Roy Vagelos, the former chairman of Merck, was 95, and that could probably be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees discussed the matter and came close to making Armstrong an offer.
Roy Vagelos's characterization here is interesting, because it provides some interesting sequencing implications, not least because the Vagelos donation was made public on 22 August with no public acknowledgement of the Armstrong condition. Which just so happened to be aweek after Armstrong took the acting-President position after Shafik's resignation on 14 August 24.
Which created a sequencing dynamic of...
- 14 August 24: Armstrong emerges from the fall of Shafik as the new/acting University President... implicitly as a disconnected / apolitical / temporary choice
- 22 August 24: Within a week of Shafik's ascent, VIP/Biggest Fan donors who love her so much make mega-donation... conditional on Armstrong losing power
Naturally, knowing that the biggest financial windfall of her university's year is conditional on her future exit, Armstrong...
- begins campaigning for her temporary promotion to become permanent
- taking into confidence the (Jewish!) professor who planted the first knife in her predecessor's final fall
- is remarkably engaged with often-overlooked university faculty, including humanities departments, to building teacher support
- begins a campaign for student support, apologizing for / signaling non-support of her predecessor's rule-enforcement (and CRA-compliance) policies
Which continues so that-
- Summer 2024-First Quarter 2025: Armstrong continues this campaign despite the biggest donation of the previous year being explicitly-but-secretly conditional against it
- Summer 2024 On: The 'we care about antisemtic indiscipline' faction grained predominance on the Board
- March 2025: A group of well-connected Columbian institutionalists publish a warning that a hostile incoming Trump administration could cut $250 million in the short term
But really, remember the context.
- $400 million is more than $250 million
- And the donor who set the condition is, like, 95, and will die in a few years
- And the Board- or at least Armstrong's allies/supporters on the Board- think that condition 'could be sorted out'
- So there's not really a risk of losing $400 million!
And Armstrong would look really, really good to the student/teacher protestor block if she heroically stood up to the Trump administration, and held out against to any short-term cuts thanks to her ability to pull in that $400 million mega-donation to cover a year of cuts.
And thus Katrina Armstrong almost got the job of her ambitions, the accolades of her humanity peers, and the support of the Board.
And then the Fire Nation Trump Administration Attacked
Such plans were obliterated when Trump began his assault. On the right, there was a consensus that among elite universities, Columbia was the weakest link. “Columbia is just the least defensible,” Rufo said. “I mean, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia were the least defensible. They showed the maximum weakness. And so I think that’s why the president selected them first.”
Initial efforts start small, but escalate week by week.
Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism moved rapidly, from a warning shot about cutting $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal agents began knocking on students’ doors and waiting in the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent spokesperson for the lawn encampments, and flew him to a prison in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been released.) On March 13, Trump’s task force delivered what faculty refer to as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom note,” a list of nine demands that had to be met before the government would consider reinstating the money, with a one-week deadline.
Yes, those individuals are non-citizens who were involved in participating or leading the Columbia protests. However, one of the interesting demands from the 'ransom note' list is actually institutional power related..
One of the bold letter demands is Primacy of the President in disciplinary matters, i.e. restoring the Bollinger reform, and reversing the late-Shafik power turnover to the University Senate.
Some held out hope for a defiant university administration. There was just one problem for the 'concede no ground' caucus-
Armstrong's support from the (still-Bollinger-era) Board wasn't as firm as she (probably) presumed.
The Fall of Armstrong
But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it [the Board of Trustees] sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English, was among the faculty aghast at the decision. “It’s more than capitulation,” Halberstam told me a few hours after the letter was released. “It’s anticipating even more demands that might be made and fulfilling them in advance.” The Trump administration’s initial letter hadn’t mentioned “viewpoint diversity,” code words that generally mean hiring more conservatives as professors, but Columbia pledged that searches for new faculty had already begun.
Again- remember the department.
But also- remember the sequencing.
- Armstrong is made temporary President on donor big money condition that Armstrong leave
- Armstrong lobbies hard to be Real President, despite the condition
- Armstrong starts to go directly against the Board's summer 2024 consensus on the issue
- Armstrong relaxes policies against student protestors the Board thinks are Very Concerning
- Armstrong builds ties with faculty opposed to the opposing the protestors
- Armstrong dismisses increasingly unsubtle warnings regarding the incoming Trump administration
- Even after Trump's election, Armstrong thinks she is on track to become President
- The Board encourages this belief, if she'll just hold on a little longer
- One the first and predictable challenge, the Board folds
A sequence-conspiracist might think that- as Armstrong made her political alliances known- she was left to take an easily foreseeable fall.
Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly fast. There were rumors that she and other members of the administration would be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one point, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority scholars at Columbia with what was then the largest gift in Ivy League history, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a strategy for defending it. Armstrong did not write back for four weeks. Khalil’s wife, who gave birth to their first child while he was incarcerated, has never received a note or offer of assistance from Columbia. The members of the university’s internal antisemitism review, concerned that their work could have lent legitimacy to Trump’s attack, took it upon themselves to write a statement. Administrators never issued it.
John Kluge's Sr.'s gift had been for... $400 million. Back in... 2007.
While $400 mil in 2007 is more than $400 mil in 2024, 2024 is a heck of a lot more recent- and influential- than 2007. And John Kluge Junior is not the one donating in a year Columbia needs money most.
Or, more relevantly, when Armstrong needs support most.
Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted.
Elsewhere...
Armstrong is 59, and in her years running Columbia’s medical center, she had cultivated a bedside manner that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her short time triaging the entire university’s problems had taken a visible toll. “She looked like she was on the verge of collapse,” someone who dealt with her regularly said. To another, “she seemed like a person who desperately needed friends and allies and felt like she was very alone.”
Armstrong's finishing moment was, perhaps appropriately, a matter of record when she tried to make it not. Twice, sorta.
In the end, it was another bit of amateur hour that sank Armstrong. At one of the private faculty meetings where she tried to spin the deal with Trump as a win, participants warned that their videoconferencing software was generating a transcript. “The person who’d set up the meeting said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to stop that. Can anybody — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of the professors present. “They allowed a confidential meeting with the faculty to go on, knowing that there was a transcription being made. And then of course it was leaked. I mean, it was such a shambolic event. She wasn’t in control. Isn’t that just an indication of complete discombobulation in our leadership?”
...
She announced that Columbia would comply. And then, when she nearly blew up the deal by privately telling faculty that it wasn’t a capitulation, that in fact there was some wiggle room, she lost her job. On March 28, the same day Armstrong resigned, she learned that Trump’s task force had demanded she appear in Washington without delay.
In the deposition room, Armstrong seemed determined, most of all, to avoid perjuring herself. She could not recall when she had become acting president. She struggled to say who is truly in charge of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to admit that Columbia was indifferent to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” five times and as “challenging” or “difficult” 11 times and said she didn’t recall at least 28 times.
There is some irony in how Armstrong was replaced, though.
Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone. Only a week earlier, the former research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was secure: “You can’t fire an interim. You’re really not going to be able to hire a president after you do that.” With few good options, the trustees replaced Armstrong with one of their own. Close observers of Columbia’s demons noted that Armstrong, a creature of the profitable medical division, had been knifed by someone from the underfunded liberal arts.
So Armstrong was replaced by a member of the (Bollinger)-era Trustee Board member, Claire Shipman.
And not just any board member- the co-Chair.
What Next for Columbia?
In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an acting president replacing an interim president replacing a failed president, is beating expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC News, she is a confident, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she knows the institution. She met privately with 300 restive faculty in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes worth leaking to the press. She is taking actions that are symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the first time — and structural. Shipman announced reviews of Columbia’s communications office and financial model and started a website with resources for international students fearful of deportation. Most significantly, Shipman is calling for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I am deeply committed to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to doing away with major elements of it.
And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.
In the end, perhaps Bollinger, or at least his influence, will win the Columbia game of chairs after all.
What Columbia should do with its governance structure is a wide-open question. The Stand Columbia Society has called for “fundamental reform” and predicted “the end of the University Senate as we know it.” It would likely ignite yet another round of protest on campus if the trustees were to formally reduce the power that faculty and students wield through the senate. And yet the current system, conceived in crisis half a century ago, is clearly not working.
Or maybe not. Chaos is a ladder, and all that.
Then again...
On a Wednesday evening in April [2025], for the first time, two trustees met publicly with students to hear their concerns about the senate — and everything else that had gone wrong over the past two years. The event was held in the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Forum, a 56,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street designed by Renzo Piano’s firm. It didn’t begin well. There was confusion about the start time, and when a moderator said at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees had to leave at seven, there were angry calls of “Is that a joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism school who went to work on Wall Street, remained and gamely took students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get through this so you all understand it and then you can yell at me,” he said. The longest applause of the night came when a student noted that while Columbia had formed its own task force on antisemitism, it had not created one to deal with “the demonization of Palestinians.”
After an hour, Goggin gathered his things. “I think we’ve had a good conversation. You want to yell at me, but I really do appreciate all of you,” he said. Someone in the audience shouted, “Is our money going to kill kids in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In less than a minute, the students and faculty turned the town hall into an organizing session, and someone was at the microphone calling for a general strike.
I am sure they, and their preferred University leaders, will have the Board's full support.
Dean
Flairless
17d ago
Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)
/
How about that Democratic National Committee drama last week month, am I right?
This post started being sketched out last month, in expectation of a predictable event just last week. Then the last couple of weeks happened, and what could have been an interesting culture war episode got overshadowed by, well, war-war. Crazy times… but the premise is still relevant in the future, if not now. So, ahem.
Last week’s resolution to some ongoing party drama has implications for the next year or so of American politics. Implications include intended infighting, pessimistic predictions for Senate prospects, and a predictable next escalation enforcement of federal laws that will feed the partisan polemics of dictatorship and whatnot. This is because as the progressives and establishment Democrats begin to position against eachother while trying to use Trump as a foil for their internal party power struggle, the Trump Administration looks to be preparing enforcement action against the professional protest apparatus involved in recent not-entirely-peaceful riots in LA and elsewhere, which both will strike at parts of the Democratic power base but also provide leverage for the Democrat factions to try and use against eachother even as they loudly decry it.
This post is looking to organize thoughts and identify trends that can help predict / make sense of some of the upcoming predictable public drama that will shape American media coverage through 2026. When equally predictable media campaigns follow, you’ll (hopefully) be taken less by surprise, and have an ear open for what may not be said at the time.
/
Part 1: The 2026 Democrat Senate Prospects
Not to put too fine a line on it, but in some respects the 2026 midterms are a lost cause for the Democrats, and some of the ongoing politic are going to be a reflection of that context.
Part of the background of today’s subject really begins five years ago, in the 2020 US election. The same election that brought Biden to the Presidency also got the Democratic Party 50 seats in the US Senate, giving them control of the Senate with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.
At the time, this was a great and glorious thing for the Biden Administration, as it was a key part of giving the Democrats the might trifecta, which is to say control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. As narrow as the Senate margin was, it supported things like appointing judges, budgets via reconciliation, and so on. This was a highwater mark of Democrat institutional power, before last year’s 2024 brought in the current Republican trifecta.
Most people are familiar with this, and are also likely familiar with how the ruling party nearly always looses House of Representative seats in the midterms after an election. Presidential approval drops, the base gets complacent, the opposition gets hungrier / more motivated, all that jazz. The US House changes quickly, as every elected representative is up for re-election every two years.
What people may not realize is that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every cycle, as the 6-year terms are staggered so that only one third are up for grabs at any given cycle. This means that far less of the currently Republican-dominated Senate is up for re-election. It also means that the seats that are, are the seats that were last voted in 2020.
It also means that senate maps can be deeply uncompetitive. Like how most Republican Senate seats this cycle are in solidly red states, so that there are about two competitive Republican seats, but four competitive Democratic seats.. While there are no guarantees in politics, it is not only plausible/likely for the Republicans to maintain control of the Senate this cycle, but to increase their margin of Senate control. After all, the last cycle these seats were up was 2020 pandemic election, and Biden’s results then were considered an especially good showing.
This is why US political watchers have been warning since the earliest parts of the Trump Administration- before any of the current drama- that the Democrats face a rough wall next year. While the House is often more competitive and up for being flipped, the Senate is much less malleable. And without control of both the House and the Senate, the ability of the opposition party to limit / oppose / impeach the President is relatively limited. (Or rather- they can impeach all they want, but lose in the Senate.)
The lack of formal ability is important. It would mean that even if the Democrats take the House, then they could impeach Trump however many times they want, but not remove him due to a lack of the Senate. It means the House could refuse to pass a funding bill, but they couldn’t use Control of Congress to dictate terms of short-term spending bills to prevent Trump’s options to further gut parts of the federal government during a shutdown. Having one chamber of Congress is better than none, but it makes those leaders relatively impotent.
This is relevant scene setting, because this is a clear and obvious wall that the Democratic Party is heading towards. If they fail, they can take solace in ‘just’ retaking the House, but the worse they do, the more bitter the recriminations. At the same time, while the senate map is daunting, there is also a clear way forward.
If the Democrats want to defeat Trump over all else, they need to (re)build the anti-Trump coalition. Use opposition and public discontent to Trump to turn out their base. If there isn’t enough organically, then manufacture and generate more, using all the levers of influence and political mobilization they can across the institutions they still control. To do as well as they can, they need to work together.
Insert laconic ‘If.’
Alternatively, a dismal year where Senate gains are unrealistic is the best election cycle for internecine conflict over the soul, leadership, and composition of the Democratic Party going into 2028.
/
Part 2: DNC Drama
Insert the multi-month Democratic National Committee drama that resolved last Friday, when Washington State Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad won the election for the open vice chair position of the DNC. Shasti Conrad herself is irrelevant to this story, besides that she is an establishment democratic, and onboard with the DNC’s job of helping get Democrats elected across the country.
Why was there an open vice chair of the DNC? Because the Democratic establishment defenestrated the previously elected chair, David Hogg, over his still current intention to primary ‘asleep at the wheel’ sitting elected Democrats with younger (and more progressive) challengers.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No one literally threw David Hogg out a window. He “resigned” before he could be formally removed. And his removal technically wasn’t because he promised to use his DNC position to give $20 million USD to his personal super PAC ‘Leaders We Deserve,’ breaking DNC neutrality to primary his internal-party political opponents. Rather, a DNC subcommittee recommended a redo of the otherwise uncontested DNC election on grounds of procedural issues.
And by procedural issues, the standard media coverage is obviously referring to
In her complaint, shared with Semafor by a Democratic source, Free argued that she lost a “fatally flawed election that violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women of color candidates,” and asks for “two new vice chair elections.” In February, after several rounds of voting, the race came down to five candidates – Kenyatta, Hogg, Free, and two other women. Kenyatta and Hogg claimed the open spots.
“By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity,” argued Free, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
If that parsed to what you think it parsed to- yes. David Hogg, a young white man whose ascent into progressive politics was based primarily on being a school shooting survivor](https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article286954330.html), got out-progressive stacked by a female minority over… a race and gender quota.
Ms. Free filed her objection at the end of February, well before Mr. Hogg was called a Jackass by notable / still influential Democratic strategist James Carville in late April](https://www.drewberquist.com/2025/05/james-carville-calls-out-jackass-david-hogg-directly-to-his-face-watch/). Clearly her action was unmotivated by any desire for personal advancement, and her complaint was not a convenient pretext for senior Democratic party officials like DNC Chair Ken Martin to remove a vocal progressive who sought to style himself as the next AOC.
If it were, though, then it seems the DNC establishment won an important victory. Given the first-past-the-post nature of (most) US elections, primarying your own party is a great way to expose almost-certain-win seats for a Republican upset if the primary dispute bleeds over to the general election. (American politicians are infamous for their magnanimous forgiveness in such things.) Additionally, even though Hogg ‘only’ wanted to primary dems in ‘safe’ seats, that in itself would have represented an attempt to make the permanent / core Democratic party more progressive, and leave the non-Progressives in the unstable / competitive seats. Over time, attrition would ensure that the powerful committees (which tend to go to those with seniority, i.e. safer seats over time) would go to progressives, while the non-progressive Democrats stood to be turned into the next round of Blue Dog Democrats- tolerated to a point, but sacrificed in the name of some policy priority popular with the core but unpalatable to the broader electorate in competitive areas.
Or perhaps the geriatric problem got worse. David Hogg was, after all, supposed to be part of the solution by getting the younger gen-Z into Democratic offices. His earlier PAC efforts of $8 million for young progressives was lauded at the time for getting candidates on the ballot and elected at lower levels in various red states, such as the youngest Texas-Senate senator. This was supposed to be all the more important after Trump made major gains amongst young voters in the 2024 election. David Hogg was (supposed) to be part of the solution for that, hence his relatively meteoric ascent. Even his message on primarying out the old, infirm, and insufficiently progressive resonated- something like 60% of the Democratic party want the leadership who just replaced Hogg to be replaced.
Or perhaps not. James Carville may be one of the louder cranks to publicly claim the Progressive wing is detrimental to the Democratic Party, but he is not the only one by any means. And while Carville has suggested that the party should have an amicable split over pronoun politics with progressives going off their own way, he’s also accused progressive wing leaders like AOC and Bernie Sanders of being more interested in running against Democrats than the Republicans. While Carville makes the motions of a good party man who would come behind the party regardless who wins, there is an awareness that not everyone is interested in the party winning as much as winning the party.
The point of this segment is not (just) to give some context to an American political drama you’d rarely hear about (and probably didn’t given the events of last week). The point is that an institutional power struggle is already underway between the progressive (and often younger) wing of the Democratic Party, and the (older) establishment.
David Hogg was just an iteration of more direct party-on-party fighting. He lost the institutional battle, and his supporters were not influential enough to protect him. At the same time, David Hogg would like you to know he’s not going anywhere. He still intends to primary, or at least threaten to primary, sitting Democrats. Since Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program over the weekend, Hogg has argued any Democrat who supports Trump on the conflict should be primaried. Now that he is free of the expectation of DNC neutrality, he is free to pick fights with fellow, though rarely progressive, democrats.
For now, though, inter-Democratic competition for influence and future electoral prospects is taking a more amicable, or at least acceptable, turn of targets- who can turn out support for anti-Trump efforts.
Or, to put it another way- the acceptable form of inter-Democrat competition is, for the moment, orienting to who can oppose Trump the best.
/
Part 3: Trump Protest Power
Not to blow anyone’s mind, but Trump is kind of unpopular with Democrats, and they’d really like their elites to fight back.
After a dispirited and divided start to the new administration, where Trump’s 100 Days agenda was dominated by DOGE tearing through the bureaucracy and Senate Minority Leader Schumer avoided a government shutdown to partisan discontent, despite his belief that doing so would have empowered Trump more, early Democratic party polling suggested a desire to on the base for more and more active resistance.
How to fight was up for debate, and rather than a comprehensive strategy something of a spaghetti strategy of ‘throw everything at the wall and see what works’ was pursued. Many of these have been covered in the Motte over the past weeks, from the record-breaking national injunctions, to the media campaigns over the ICE deportations trying to equivocate migrant deportations with citizen exile, to the efforts to stall DOGE and administrative personnel actions. The recent Ivy League struggles by the likes of Yale and Harvard against Trump are also emblematic, as (university) administration have risen and fallen depending on if they are seen as weak against Trump. That’s not to say all these actions have been successful- for every ‘Trump suffers major blow in effort to [X]’ there is often a partially or mostly reversed decision later- but it is popular, and clearly so.
In the last weeks, this has organized to the point where various Democratic media organs are explicitly re-raising the #Resistance moniker, trying to re-build the sort of mass-mobilization efforts that fortified democracy to save the 2020 election. This recently culminated with the mid-June No Kings protest, where various DNC-aligned organizations including MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America organized nation-wide protests. These protests were meant to eclipse the military parade in D.C. for the 250th anniversary of the US Army (or Trump’s birthday, if you prefer), and called to mind the various early anti-Trump protests of the first administration. These protests demonstrate organizational capacity, coordination efforts, influence with the sort of people to show up, and of course the supporting media coverage to get their message out.
There was just one slight problem for the stage-managed revival of the #Resistance- rioters waving the Mexican Flag over burning cars in Los Angeles, California, beat them to the punch.
While the actual photo was almost certainly one of those naturally occurring protest images, the California protests weren’t (quite). On 6 June, about a week and a half before the No Kings protests for the 14th, hundreds of protestors rallied in downtown Los Angeles to protest various ICE raids that had occurred across the city earlier that day. By the 7th, local riot police and teargas were being used On the 8th, Trump federalized California National Guard over California Governor Newsom’s objection to protect federal property and personnel.
This was an unusual, arguably provocative, decision. In US law, national guard operate under the state governor’s control and are not legally under Presidential or federal control unless done under certain legal authorities. Failure to do so is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-civil-war-reconstruction act making it a crime to use federal forces in law enforcement roles except where authorized by Congress. Trump invoking these authorities- which provide the Congressional authorization criteria- has been the subject of litigation by Governor Newsom, who opposed activation at the time, allegedly on grounds it would inflame the protests- which it arguably did.
Why did Trump do it, besides malicious disregard for the governor? Trump’s decision to do so anyways was likely influenced by the acting ICE director alleging that the LAPD took 2 hours to respond to requests for law enforcement assistance on 6 June despite multiple calls when ICE agents were swarmed by objectors during the 6 June enforcement raids that kickstarted the protests-turned-riots. The LA Police Chief has disputed this, claiming police responded in 38 minutes, citing traffic. (There is a joke to be made about LA traffic and how this is plausible.) The Police Chief also claimed they weren’t informed ahead of time, which is… also quite plausible.
Naturally / inevitably, however, the California protests became at least a short term win for Governor Newsom, whose post-protest Presidential prospects for 2026 seem stronger for having stood up to / opposed Trump. Resistance in this contexts has been more about verbal sparring and legal objections than something more concrete. Less assembling a platoon of people and buying the biggest fireworks possible to attack police, and more name calling, daring the administration to arrest him, and general ‘Trump is acting like a dictator’ themes. You know, the usual things political opponents in dictatorships do. At the same time, Newsom is playing the role of the moderate, and while it’s not like he can take full credit for the work of District Attorneys and such, California is publicizing charging some of the worst protestors in ways that weren’t really publicized during the Trump 1 era left-coded protests.
Except… Newsom isn’t the only winner here. Or necessarily the biggest Democratic power player. That may yet go to another, David Huerta.
If you don’t know who David Heurta is, you are not alone. He is not an elected politician, a party strategist, or elder statesman. He is a union leader. To quote his Biden-era White House bio when he was an honored guest-
David Huerta is President of the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) whose members are service workers predominately from the commercial real estate industry. As a labor leader, David has worked to build an immigrant integration program that includes English classes for union members. Under his leadership, hundreds of SEIU-USWW members have become U.S. citizens. In addition, he has advocated for comprehensive immigration reform by empowering SEIU-USWW members to become their own advocates for change.
Or to put it another way- David Huerta is part of the labor union wing of the Democratic party, except his labor union is of the totally-not-illegal-immigrant sort of organized labor. And his role in the party is totally not as part of the labor union mobilization to party member pipeline that organized labor has served in the past.
Mr. Huerta was arrested Friday the 6th of June, which is to say when the protests started, for interfering with ICE operations. His protest seems to have been both non-violent and directly intended to obstruct ICE activities.
According to a Homeland Security Investigation officer's sworn affidavit, Huerta sat down in front of a vehicular gate to a staging ground for ICE operations that were ongoing nearby.
The complaint alleges he yelled to the protestors "stop the vehicles," and "it's a public sidewalk, they can't stop us."
The officer then says he asked Huerta to move from the gate so that cars could get in and out of the facility, and Huerta replied, "What are you going to do? You can't arrest all of us."
Mr. Huerta may well have been correct. Instead of everyone being arrested, Mr. Huerta was arrested. And within 12 hours hundreds of protestors were in downtown LA. Within 36 hours, hundreds grew to thousands and cars had been burned in the streets. Within 48 hours Trump sent in the national guard, clearly taking it seriously.
One on hand, this can be (as the sympathetic media seek to characterize it), a case of a peaceful labor leader being unjustly suppressed, leading to a cycle of provocation due to reckless escalation.
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
To my knowledge, no. And that’s why I would suggest that Mr. Huerta, not Governor Newsome, may end up being the bigger winner from these protests. A $50,000 bail fee is one of those things that is not exactly going to cripple not only a labor union leader with friends in high places, but someone who has- probably- gotten far, far more popular with the would-be resistance. Willing to fight ICE, protest Trump, and a labor leader?
Mr. Huerta may not be challenging Governor Newsom for the governorship or Presidency any time ever, but Mr. Huerta probably has a good future ahead of himself in the Democratic party… if the glowing editorial linked in that first mention of him wasn’t clue enough that he’s already a significant local power player.
But remember- it’s not just Mr. Huerta.
Mr. Huerta’s glory comes, somewhat, at the expense of Governor Newsom. Media coverage, and public attention, is a 0-sum game. Some elements can reinforce each other, and in this case arguably did, but other elements work against each other.
After all, their glory/prestige/anti-Trump cred comes from the protests that came at the expense of the No King’s protests. Their exposure / attention grabbing was zero-sum between ‘polite, professional’ #Resistance, and a far more immediate, visceral ‘snap’ protests.
And the California protests- where both Huerta and Newsom had their political interest incentives be firmly in the ‘maximally oppose Trump’ side of things- have given Trump and the Republicans the sort of made-for-campaign-add images that only a Mexican flag over burned cars in American cities can.
And this doesn’t count the other people involved, initially or later, and who tried to get in on the action / influence. One man has been charged with trying buy the biggest fireworks he could to arm his ‘platoon’ and shoot at police in the later LA protests. When political fireworks- figurative or literal- are prestigious, bigger demonstrations of ability garner more prestige for more influence for bigger groups.
The LA Protests and the No Kings Protests weren’t formally or even directly at odds. But they were competing in various ways. For public attention, yes, but also for Democrat consideration. The #Resistance revival has, for the moment, failed to take off. Maybe it already would have, but the LA riots stole wind from the sail, to speak. And in turn, the LA riots- despite being vehemently anti-Trump and anti-ICE, two very popular things with the Democratic base- are likely to undercut the Democrat position going into the next election cycle. Now any future No Kings-style mass protests has to either take better care to distance from the more combative, or be tarred with the politically unpalatable for the non-democrats in the electorate.
Which lowers the value (and ability) of a combined effort… but does encourage partisans to do what they can for their own interest, regardless of how it affects the rest of the party. The nature of such publicity-driven contests creates natural incentives for speed (to pre-empt others), high-visibility (to dominate attention), and excess (the rawest form of proof-of-sincerity).
This creates something of a prisoners dilemma where everyone has an incentive to ‘defect’ first by going for their own public display, rather than coordinating. Even if the party, collectively, would perform better if everyone sang from the same sheet of music, any ambitious leader is incentivized to not be part of the choir.
The point here isn’t that these contemporary protests are adversaries. It is that these contemporary incentives are occurring at the same time as the inter-party conflict, where the David Hogg and progressives of the party want more combative responses at the expense of other party members. And if they can do so- and win party acclaim- by pushing protest actions as aggressively as possible against Trump, the acceptable target, rather than against other Democrats…
That’s a risky mix, even before you consider that another key actor has his own agency in this brewing inner-party struggle.
/
Part 4: Trump Can Strike Back (Lawfully)
I’m torn between introducing this section as ‘Trump’s White House is more competent than you may want to believe’ and ‘it’s not legal just because it’s anti-Trump,’ and ‘don’t count on departed friends to protect you.’ All are applicable.
The first is a reminder / warning against those who want to dismiss the Trump administration’s ability for deliberate, even clever, action. Whatever your opinion on Trump himself, he is not an incompetent at everything he does. Nor, more importantly, are the people he’s brought into this administration. There are implications of some exceptionally competent people who understand how the government works at a mechanical level, as demonstrated from the takedown of USAID through dual-hatting, the ongoing efforts to move Executive branch agencies outside of the National Capital Region, and the budget/shutdown politics. I’ve even gone so far as to argue that various policy rollouts like DOGE have been done with the intent of shaping later / future policy efforts. The Project 2025 wishlist may not have been a formal Trump policy plan of everything he’d agreed to, but there are a lot of discrete, actionable items there that have been pursued as able by those willing to work with/for Trump.
The point here isn’t to praise, but to make a point about institutional competence. There are people in the administration who know what they are doing, know what they want, and know how to go about turning that desire into policy. And when they know to expect resistance, they loosely know who and what they need to act against- not least because various parts of the #Resistance wrote extensive tell-all articles last time to take credit for how they worked together to link elected politicians, media, labor organizers, and business interests worked together to manage anti-Trump protests.
When political opponents write a brag sheet of dubiously legal measures they took to defeat you, it doesn’t take the most capable political actor to plan to mitigate it on round two.
It’s not even something that necessarily only started this year. Reaching way back to 2017, you may (not) remember the Dakota Pipeline Protests, which were one of the anti-Trump-coded protests in the early first trump administration. In short, American tribal / environmentalist protests over a pipeline escalated after Trump voiced support, including occupations of work sites, blockades against ground routes to resupply them, and so on. It was framed as ‘Trump against native Americans and environmentalists,’ and the protestors received significant public media support at the time.
Well, after over half a decade in court, Greenpeace has been $660 million in damages for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. This may threaten to bankrupt the organization, though it will be years more before it works through the system. The crux of the verdict derives from the tens of thousands of dollars raised to train and send thousands of protestors, along with logistical support, with awareness and sanction at the highest levels of the organization.
Parallels to other mass protest organizers should hopefully be obvious.
This Time Would Be Different even if Trump were not Actually a Dictator this term, but because various factors that the Democratic party and partisans have taken for granted in the past two decades are changing. Various dynamics that let the election fortification of 2020 succeed were based variously on low awareness by the Trump administration of what was going on, having the right friends in the right places to make it work, and reluctance by the government(s) to go after coordinating elements.
As elements of this change, the system gears grind against rather than with each other. And in the sort of decentralized, every-Dem-is-pursuing-their-own-interest protest environment that the No Kings vs. Newsom vs. Huerte anti-Trump protests have been showing, there are probably going to be far more loose threads, and far more willingness to pursue them, going forward.
Take the Justice Department. A good deal of prosecution by any government is discretionary. You only have so many investigators, only so many prosecutors, and more potential crimes than you can handle. You prioritize what to pursue, and drop what you don’t want to. This is how something like 90% to 95% of the 2020 Floyd protest charges were dropped or never pursued in various jurisdictions.
But at the same time, non-prosecution is a choice, not a natural state of a just world. And it is a choice that can be made otherwise if someone wants to. Or if the people who wouldn’t want to depart and are replaced.
For example, the DOJ Civil Rights Division had a reputation for seeking certain types of civil rights cases, and not being as interested in others, such as university admissions discrimination. I say ‘had’ because something like 70% of the DOJ Civil Rights Division has departed since Trump took office. Whatever reputation / expectation you have of the Civil Rights Division, it’s probably not quite what the new DOJ CRD priorities are.
The “Civil Division Enforcement Priorities” memorandum identifies five priorities: (1) combatting discriminatory practices and policies, (2) ending antisemitism, (3) protecting women and children, (4) ending “sanctuary” jurisdictions, and (5) prioritizing denaturalization of naturalized U.S. citizens.
But this is the new institutional direction of the CRD. It still has the legal authorities Congress gave to the ‘old’ CRD. But as the saying goes, “people are policy,” and the people in the CRD have changed. Other people’s expectations just haven’t caught up to, say, the DOJ opening a civil rights case against any state or local officials involved sanctuary city politics that also just-so-happen to overlaps with, say, anti-federal riots.
I raised the fireworks platoon guy earlier, but that is far from the only case that can be pursued. About a week into the protests, a crowd broke into an ICE detention facility, overpowered national guard soldiers, and tried to release the detainees before about 100 law enforcement officers responded. That’s various charges on its own. The FBI is reportedly considering a criminal conspiracy line of effort for any groups involved in organizing the violent protests. The IRS is reportedly reviewing into non-profit and other organizational funding as part of the money flow investigation. Parallel to those parallels, House Republicans are investigating a US billionaire with possible ties to the protests, and the Chinese Communist Party… and Code Pink,an anti-war/social-justice organization.
And this doesn’t include other possible things that could be pursued. Doxing can be a crime… but what if its a municipal mayor who decides to dox ICE agents? When mostly peaceful protests are held outside of hotels suspected of hosting ICE agents, what if / when a not-entirely-peaceful protest occurs outside of a hotel that isn’t? When left-coded social media encourages eachother to follow and record ICE agents at work, what happens if someone ignores the ACLU’s carefully worded advice on dealing with law enforcement, particularly what the agents areallowed to do?
Would arrests and prosecutions be politically motivated? Sure, if you want. When any prosecution is discretionary, all high-profile investigations and prosecutions are arguably motivated. Similarly, a refusal to do so can also be motivated.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could be found. It won’t even require ‘three felonies a day’ over-criminalization of anything.
The point I am trying to make here is that there is a greater risk of legal risk to anti-Trump partisans this administration than in the last two, and this is matched by a greater interest in the Trump administration to do so.
This is going to challenge people’s expectations / understanding of what ‘should’ be tolerated / not challenged as illegal, but will be viewed as suspect now. I want to emphasize this even further, since this isn’t ‘merely’ corruption of justice, but an element of generational norms being overturned.
12 of the last 16 years have seen the American federal government under the control of the Democratic party. The Obama and Biden administrations would generally sympathize with, and not be interested in aggressively pursuing, Democrat-coded protestors. Four of the other last 16 years were the resistance phase, where significant parts of the government bureaucracy deliberately stonewalled Trump efforts- and in some cases, in active collusion with protest organizers. Four years before that, the last four years of the Bush administration, were also a period of large-scale and sustained political protest environments as part of the Democratic party apparatus, when the Bush Administration was sensitive to how it could respond due to falling political legitimacy and political norms of the era.
20+ years of established expectations on ‘what you can get away with at a protest’ is a generation. Younger partisans like David Hogg have spent their entire adult / politically-aware lives in that environment. It is a norm to them, the way things have ‘always’ been.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
/
Part 5: When a Resistance Devours Itself
This is the final section, and an effort to bring the points above together into a hopefully coherent but non-obvious synthesis.
My forecast prediction is that over the next year, inter-Democrat competition is going to revolve around who can ‘stand up to’ / fight Trump by pressing the limit of the law, but attempts to toe the line are going to overstep changes in enforcement practices. This will fuel anti-Trump sentiment amongst Democrats and accusations of tyranny, but also influence the unfolding of the Democratic internal struggle not only going into 2026, but even into the 2028 election. This will be because the Trump administration will likely go after the ‘connective tissue’ of the Democratic protest-mobilization apparatus where it detects legal risk. This, in turn, can become a tool in the Democratic internal conflict that sub-factions can utilize against each other, because those same mobilization organizations are factional players in the Democratic internal conflict.
In part one, we made a case for why the Senate will be a rough bet for the Democrats at all. While coherent parties can spin a partial failure into a partial success, this will likely hinder the institutional ability of the Democrats to do major limits on the Republican party. This is liable to frustrate partisans, and lead to highly symbolic protests in the institutions, and other actions outside of institutions.
In part two, we raised the ongoing internal conflict within the Democratic party. Significant parts of the Progressive wing have and are making efforts to actively displace non-progressive rivals for control and even composition of the Democratic Party establishment. The non-progressive institutionalists won, but they are facing the challenge of the upcoming mid-terms, even as the progressives are trying to take the mantle of ‘actually fighting Trump.’ Democratic institutions are already being used against each other.
In part three, we raised how ‘actually fighting’ is something of a zero-sum game on the ability of leaders to mobilize protests and take the spotlight. Would-be leaders trying to organize great protests can be pre-empted and upstaged even accidentally by those doing their own thing with more modest means. When paired with the internal party struggle in part two, this creates incentives for would-be leaders of the party to push aggressive protests to the limits of the law.
In part four, we make the point is that the limit of the law is changing, and that this implication is not widely recognized. Between changes in institutional composition that have changed out more sympathetic actors who could have turned a blind eye, increased awareness of how the Democratic protest mobilization structure works, and the improved institutional understanding of the Trump administration on how to shape and act through the bureaucracy, the legal-enforcement environment has changed. When it is noticed, it will be probably be decried as tyranny, but there are non-tyrannical causes.
In part five, I want to make a point that these are not just individual facets that might each be an interesting observation of their own but part of a feedback loop. How the Trump Administration chooses to prosecute law-pressing protests is itself going to be a factor in the internal democratic power struggle in both future elections and the outcome of the Democratic power struggle.
The 2026 election argument is reasoning from (future) public polling. Will Trump and the Republicans be more or less popular if they crack down on lawbreakers involved in protests? If the public supports anti-ICE protestors over Trump, then the more anti-ICE protests, the better the midterm results. As a consequence, internal democratic party logic might be to maximize protests, even if it involves lawbreaking, for a net gain. Especially if/when anger at Trump administration arrest and prosecutions might turn out the base.
But this is an assumption, not a conclusion. While there are parts of the Trump migration policies that are unpopular, there are parts that remain popular. Moreover, prosecutions of protest elements can motivate the Trump base as well, and voter apathy/antipathy could deter Democrat support. It could well be a negative effect. We’ll see which proves right in the midterms.
What is arguably more important, however, is if the organizations that organize and execute start to being targeted, and what that might mean going into 2028.
Organizations that engage in mass protest politics, like Greenpeace, don’t only organize protests against Red Tribe-coded efforts. That money and manpower is put to use in other ways in other contexts. For Democratic party organizations, that includes things like voter mobilization, organizing fundraising, and coordinating communications. These take money and manpower, and when you lack the resources and the unified efforts, you end up like the Florida Democratic Party, which has practically collapsed in the third largest US state.
That is the larger 2028 election implication, if aggressive protest mobilizers in 2025-2026 lead to investigations/prosecutions in 2027-2028 due to the increased willingness to enforce against grey zone activities. The generational expectations of what could/would be prosecuted are shifted, so there’s the risk, and the consequence could be a partial paralysis of the Democratic Party mobilization/organization infrastructure in the next presidential election. Organizations frozen, donors uncertain/afraid to give to who, and so on.
This will obviously, understandably, and predictably alarm Democratic partisans. Condemnations will be demanded and almost certainly provided. However… it will also shape the inter-Democratic conflict as which organizations are affected/investigated first and most will matter.
After all, Democratic organizations don’t only try to help all Democrats get elected. Some, like Leaders We Deserve, would rather some Democrats lose so that a personal faction can get in place instead.
And if, hypothetically, some process error or rules violation were to expose that faction to legal risk- where the big bad Trump administration might act and convenient clear the field…
Well, the surviving winners would certainly happily condemn the Trump administration for doing so. And get the perks with the party base for doing so. But it sure would be convenient, wouldn’t it?
This is the risk of the Democratic civil war quote-unquote “escalating” in the midst of the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down where it can. It’s not just that Democrats are fighting each other, or that Democrats fight Trump. It can be that Democrats use Trump to fight each other as a tool for their internal conflict.
If anyone has studied (or, worse, lived in/through) a country going through a civil war, especially one with a resistance with little formal power but motivated by performative acts of defiance, this should not be surprising. This has been a common / well recorded dynamic where rival insurgent groups are nominally on the same side, but competing with each other, and leverage the hated oppressor as a tool in their conflict.
Sometimes it’s as direct as an anonymous informant dropping a tip, so that a raid can go after a rival. Perhaps that old, establishment incumbent is in the way, but wouldn't be if evidence of patronage-network corruption were passed on to a hostile FBI. Or maybe that young, reckless progressive who didn't learn how to play the limits of the protests of the 70s makes a mistake that could leave them out and unprotected. Action, or inaction, could have similar effects when a hostile administration is looking for something to act on.
Does such feuding it hurt the combined potential of the resistance overall? Sure. Does it improve the hated authority’s position to have one less threat? Also sure. But does it position you better for influence / control of the local resistance networks, i.e. the democratic party?
This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.
But in making that power play, and then the institutionalist purge of Hogg through totally-not-pretextual means, the Hogg struggle helped reframe the nature of the competition. It is not merely ‘how do the Democrats struggle against Trump?’ It is now, increasingly, ‘how do the Democrats use existing institutions in the struggle against each other?’
And since Trump is still a relevant actor, both as a foil and as an agent in his own right, the emerging Democratic infighting paradigm may well become ‘how do we use Trump in our struggle against each other?’
Read it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the 'Bukele only succeeded by cutting deals with gang leaders' has been a rising argument of the last year, but also mostly a cope argument from his political opposition which writes to the Anglophone audience and tries to undercut Bukele claims to success.
There's a couple significant weaknesses in the article, both on its own front and on it's meta-context.
On its own it has some significant gaps which indicats it's being written for a foreign audience rather than local analysis, one of which is the total lack of acknowledgement of geography and demographic dispersion when comparing El Salvador versus its regional neighbors, and what that means in general.
Central American countries are geographically small relative to their larger neighborhood giants, but in terms of state control of the interiors they are even smaller, with extremely limited government ability to exert control / contest usage of significant parts of the territories. You can't even meaningfully drive from western Honduras to eastern, which is why eastern Honduras has a reputation for being where drug smugglers fly or sail to en-route to the US. The amount of territory to retreat to, and the dispersal of small-but-present human terrain, means that gangs outside of the capital have plenty of space to hide / influence / establish themselves in when the government isn't asserting itself, particularly via leveraging political rivalries / alternative power centers outside of a ruling party's maximal influence.
El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador. The country is the size of New Jersey, and the overwhelming majority of the population is within the capital region. If you get kicked out of San Salvador, there is no alternative power center to hide in the shadows of, and the government doesn't have the sort of federational subdivisions that limit jurisdiction and reach in the same way a larger country does. As a result, anti-gang successes in the capital are far more effective for nation-wide effectiveness than in other countries.
This is absolutely an argument against the Bukele model in other countries- but rather than leave that as a point that what can work in one location may not work in another, the argument has to be flipped to insinuate that what doesn't work in other places thus must not be working in El Salvador, and thus undercut the legitimacy of the Bukele administration. It's not enough for something Bukele did to be unsuitable for elsewhere- it must be a mark against Bukele.
This is similar to the reversal of argument used to insinuate that a decrease in gang weapons seized in 2023 compared to 2022 indicates a failure rather than success, first by framing it as a failure to meet a higher standard of success (gangs weakened, but not outright defeated). Gangs actively hiding their arsenals is a good indicator, it implies they (a) feel the need to, and (b) indicates they previously didn't feel a need to- but this is framed in a way to undercut rather than support the administration which led to this effect. Even the repeated returning to 'but he talks with gangs' doesn't acknowledge what would be also relevant facts to the regional audience: that everyone has to in some form, and that his alternatives were widely considered to be worse. Bukele's anti-crime bonifides and ability to go against the normal democratic insittutions was in no small part possible because many of those institutions were considered to be corrupt and even complicit with the pre-Bukele gang activity levels.
This isn't the only place where the article transitions from a commentary on crime or nominally informative analysis to more audience-shaping agendas. It is, for example, absolutely true that Bukele expanded the Supreme Court, which the article notes... but what's also true, and not noted, is that the Court issue came about in the context when the opposition tried to stonewall and prevent globally- and regionally-normal COVID-19 policies. Rather than recognize Bukele's (actually-is!) concering actions in the context of a domestic political back-and-forth, it is presented as baseless beyond what it implies in isolation for authoritarianism. It is also absolutely true that Bukele is open to Chinese investment... but what's also true, and not noted, is that Bukele is open to anyone's investment. Chinese investment is not a domestically or regionally controversial prospect, but Bukele's failure to go beyond even what the opposition or close American allies would do is presented as a moral/strategic vice.
And this is without the various tangents and allusions to things that matter of an implicitly-American audience, but are bizar if the audience is expected to be more aware of a Central American perspective. The crypto-jabs, the Xinjiang province analogy, or the pejorative references to relations with other regional actors considered bad by the American audience- these are American preoccupations, not local concerns.
None of this is indicative of particular insights of the local situation as opposed to relying heavily on anglophone source biases... which is unsurprising. The article's author is a Florida-based contributor to American foreign policy media. He is writing to his anglophone audience, but especially one dominated by a particular subset of state department / international academics of a generally left-persuasion, and what a lot of that audience wants is narrative justification to undercut Bukele.
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
In the Small-Scale Question threat, user @sickamore raised a question about Sudan. Given that it's more global news, but also tangential to culture war narratives, I figured I might raise it here. sickamore did ask for a good low down. Sadly, please accept a bad one because bad news is the easiest to quibble over, and sharing my newest reason to be depressed is supposed to be helpful or something.
Also, forgive the inconsistent citations, these are intended to be handy, not authoritative.
To start with sickamore's question:
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why? Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess? And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
To start- this is not a bad question, but it is the wrong question, for a pretty basic reason: this is not about you. Or the US. Or Russia.
What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you. When I've raised in the past in other contexts that a certain sort of American cultural chauvenism that sees everything as an extension of American politics, this is what I refer to. The Sudan crisis has foreign actors and influences, yes, but it is fundamentally an internal political crisis driven by internal actors, with their own interests, their own agency... and their own lack of self-control, because you tend not to shoot at the French diplomatic convoy you already said you were willing to help leave if you have actually good control of your forces.
They don't, because this is Sudan, and Sudan is experiencing the sort of 'the government is the internationally recognized warlords, and the warlords are fighting again' conflict that bedevils foreign policy.
First, to set the context...
For the Americans and others who couldn't find Sudan on a map if they didn't know where to look: Sudan is in Northeast the country between Egypt and Ethiopia at the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. It's part of the not-great part of Africa.
Sudan has basically been a military junta in one form or another since the 90s, and not the western-backed sort, though over the last few years there's been a detente of sort since a new military junta came to power and more or less offered to help normalize relations.
Here's a wiki summary, but the super high level feel free to quibble is-
In 1989, the political system of Sudan was "rigorously restructured" following a military coup when Omar al-Bashir, then a brigadier in the Sudanese Army, led a group of officers and ousted the government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Under al-Bashir's leadership, the new military government suspended political parties and introduced an Islamic legal code on the national level.
In the 2000s and 2010s, there was a war in Darfur you might have heard about due to the various crimes against humanity and horrific humanitarian crisis and stuff. The militia that fought on the Sudanese government side are broadly grouped/affiliated with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and are accused of war crimes. 'Crimes against Humanity' war crimes.
What you might not have known is that there is gold in those killing fields, and naturally the side with the militia to control the gold gets to profit. The RSF starts to take off as a political force, and an economic force, due to control of the gold. It also branches off to other profitable ventures, like mercenary work. Anyone familiar with the international overlap of gold interests and mercenary work may recognize some similarities with certain Russian interest groups. Yes, there is a Russian connection. But back to history.
On April 11, 2019, al-Bashir and his government were overthrown in a military coup led by his first vice president and defense minister, who then established the now ruling military junta, led by Lt. General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan. The RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, often known as Hemetti, supported Burhan in the coup and suppressing post-coup protests, including the Khartoum massacre.
After the 2019 coup, Sudan’s government was led by the Sovereign Council, a military-civilian body that is the highest power in the transitional government. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok is the civilian leader of the cabinet. This means he is not actually the leader. The Chairman of the Sovereignty Council is General Abdel Fattah Burhan of the SAF, who is backed by Hemetti, leader of the RSF.
In October 2020, Sudan made an agreement to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, as part of the agreement the United States removed Sudan from the U.S. list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.
On 25 October 2021, the Sovereignty Council and the Sudanese government were immensely dissolved after being overthrown in the 2021 Sudan coup.
Surprise surprise, the leader to come out on top again is... General Burhan of the SAF, backed by Hemetti and the RSF.
Which brings us closer to present. As part of broader western normalization and diplomatic rehabilitation, the premise of Sudan politics is that it isn't an indefinite permanent military junta, but a transition government that will, eventually, place the military under civilian rule.
This will naturally be a long and arduous process, but western support actually does demand the military itself to be consolidated, so that things like the Darfure crisis and the humanitarian castrophe that supports mass migration not happen. Which means that the Sudan Armed Forces would need to reign in and control the paramilitary militia of the Rapid Support Forces, who have a nasty history of suppressing. Which means that the RSF, rather than being an autonomous power broker with great autonomy, would be controlled by the Sudanese military, and General Burhan. Who- if he controls the RSF- would also control what the RSF controls. Like, say, gold mines.
Naturally, RSF Commander Hemetti is a patriot and a self-admitted supporter of civilian government rule, which is why earlier this month he allegedly* attempted to coup General Burhan.
I say allegedly here, because Hemetti claimed it was really Burhan and the SAF who did dirty first, but I will note that the RSF took a couple hundred Egyptian soldiers prisoner in the first day(s) of the war, which tends not to be the sort of thing that you do on accident if you're just responding.
(It does, however, make quite a sense if you have pre-meditated intent to coup the close ally/partner of the regional military partner, and thus throw one of the few military powers capable of intervening against you into a decision paralysis that keeps them from intervening against you.).
Note that this is all very western centric, and doesn't include things like how Egypt and Sudan are oriented against the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam, only mentioned the gold and russian connection when I went off script, and doesn't even touch the various arab world implications. This is just a really, really ugly history.
Here's the Dean Summary:
In 1989, there was a coup. The military junta styled itself in islamic theocracy.
In the 2000s/2010s, Sudan was a pariah state that made itself infamous in the Darfur conflict, where the RSF was a tool of suppression and humanitarian atrocities using paramilitary militia.
In the 2010s, the RSF got rich and powerful off of using its paramilitary militia to seize control of gold and other economic interests in Darfur.
In 2019, there was a new military coup led by General Burhan of the SAF, who was supported by Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary RSF. The new government ingratiates itself with the west by relaxing from the pariah policies.
In 2021, General Burhan of the SAF launches another coup, again with the support of Dagalo and the RSF. The new new government sustains western toleration/acceptance by going through negotiations of a transition to civilian government.
In 2022, western attention / negotiations for negotiation focus on consolidating the military under future civilian control. This includes consolidating the RSF under SAF control, which in turn means control of the gold and economic interests Hemetti had built up.
In April 2023, a week and a half ago, Hemetti and the RSF attempted a coup against General Burhan and the SAF with an attempted takeover of the capital of Khartoum. It failed to oust him, and the conflict looks ready to go into a sustained civil war with massive humanitarian implications.
That was an ugly history. I'll give an even worse response to the original question next.
[Last week JKF asked in the Transnational Thursday thread if the salient was defensible. That's not the quite the same question, but response I wrote had enough overlap to be relevant.
Per JKF-
I like a good blitzkreig as much as the next guy, but is this, like... actually a defensible salient? It doesn't really look like it, and throwing a bunch of guys into a new meatgrinder to attract some media attention seems not only morally reprehensible, but also (since I'm sure we're long past the point where that matters) pretty bad strategy for a country currently engaged in a war of attrition against an opponent with many more resources to attrit?
To which my response was-
Kinda / sorta / it doesn't need to be to serve the purpose of overall defense. The issue isn't the specific-holdability of this specific terrain, but rather what the Russians would need to re-secure it, particularly since while they have 'more resources', they don't necessarily have more of the right kind of resources to counter a mobile defense without compromising the offense in other sectors.
In military doctrines, there are generally two main types of defense: positional defense, and mobile defense.
A positional defense is what you generally think of in the Ukraine War over the last 2.5 years- trench lines, artillery duels, relatively static air defense needs and placements. This has its advantages for the defender in increasing cost-ratio, but disadvantages in that the opponent gets to choose when and where exactly to the attack. Similarly, it has its disadvantages for the attacker, but it also has it's advantages in some respects. Because it's mutual trenchworks, counter-attacks face the same general disadvantage, even as the general attack can establish overlapping mitigation measures for things like counter-drone / anti-air / artillery / etc, which can let the participant move forces in 'relatively' safe conditions. Positional defenses are costly, but generally more one way in favor of the larger party.
This is what Russia has reorganized its military to fight over the last two years. Tanks are used to support attacks on specific positions, mass concentrations of artillery forces and depots to support suppressive fires on static positions, etc.
A mobile defense, on the other hand, is a far more aggressive form of counter-force defense which terrain is given up for time / opportunities to maneuver and strike where most advantageous, with the goal of targetting enemy forces so that they are unable to advance / must retreat and reconsolidate, preserving the defender's control of key territory further behind and having out-sized effects on forces. It is harder to pull off in both terms of contexts and skill level, but it also has the potential to be even more efficient in terms of cost-to-the-defender, as the defender can be fighting over ground that the other side doesn't already have prepared with the sort of over-lapping systems of artillery / AA / counter-drone EW that could mitigate the force effectiveness, as only the stuff that you can carry with you can move with you. The defender can thus be more proactive in choosing when and where to counter-attack, avoid fights over specific terrain that is unfavorable, and because the attacker has to press the advance- and thus leave the advantages of positional defenses- to pursue.
The issue with mobile defenses is that you need to give up terrain for time and space for when to counter-attack the enemy force. This could lead to retreating until the war is lost, or you have to go into positional defenses you can't abandon. It also requires the political capital for a leader to be willing to tell his nation 'no, we're not going to fight over all the terrain.'
But if- hypothetically- you could get a lot of the enemy's terrain to maneuver through, which you wouldn't pay a significant political cost to give up...
This is where we start hitting the defensive context of this offensive. It's not that the surprisingly rapid advance of Ukrainian forces means a new static front line to be defended in Russia. It's that the fact that Ukrainian forces were able to maneuver so quickly forward, also means they will be able to maneuver backwards, and laterally, and thus have the capacity for a mobile defense. And because this is so far from the Russian-Ukrainian front lines, the Russians have to leave their static position setups and try to maneuver- and in doing so, open themselves up for attacks that wouldn't be possible against forces under the defensive-position envelopes.
We've already seen some of this happen. There was reportedly a HIMARs attack in Kursk that destroyed a column of Russian forces in transit. This would simply not have been possible in a normal static defense, because (a) the units wouldn't have been consolidated, (b) would have likely been in defensive positions, and (c) the area would have been under various AA/missile-defense envelopes. Similarly, there were reports of Russian platoons surrendering after being flanked and enveloped. The point isn't that the Russians are in a catastrophic defeat- the point is that the same sort of expenditure of Ukrainian resources wouldn't have achieved these sort of results if just pushed into the positional defenses.
What this means for the Russians is that they need to bring in maneuver forces of sufficient capacity / protective capabilities to push back the Ukrainians, and that this requirement increases with time. The more the Ukrainians are able to advance, the more terrain they have with which to maneuver and trade away- and the more they have, the more Russian resources are required to contain the pocket.
The issue for the Russians is that they don't have the extra army to spare. If it did, we wouldn't be discussing the Ukrainians advancing over a relatively under-defended Russian border, but the Russians advancing the other way across the relatively under-defended Ukrainian border. Unlike the Ukrainians, who built up the resources for this offensive rather than put it into the front lines, the Russians have been prioritizing beefing up the front lines over additional fronts- as seen with the recent Kharkiv offensive, which could be the analog here, but which was apparently under-resourced as a light-infantry push without significant technical/mechanized support.
Which will likely mean that Russia will need to take forces from the front lines. This likely means the reserves, not literal front line troops, but front line offensives won't be conducted with the same level if there's no reserve force to sustain the losses / exploit a success.
And in the process, those reserves are being exposed to much greater risk. This is why that HIMARs-convoy destruction is notable- the Russian maneuver warfare capability has sharply degraded over the last few years as the Russians have reverted from a post-Soviet era to a Soviet-era army, and maneuver warfare is one of the contexts where technological differentials matters more and more. The Russians are able to mitigate some of the risks of modern western capabilities when they have nested EW/AA capabilities, but when you take Russian forces out of it, you're getting back to the technology differentials of the Desert Shield era.
Which is how this serves as a strategic-level defense even if no territory or town is fought over street-by-street. Even if this offensive 'only' takes a month for the Russians to roll back to the border, that's a month of disruption to the Russian offensives elsewhere, at higher system vulnerability than in the positional defense paradigm. The Ukrainians could blunder this, of course... but even if the Russians tried to follow them right across the border, that would be a relative Ukrainian win, as there was a reason that the Russians weren't attacking that border anyway, and forces the Russians commit there aren't fueling the advances elsewhere.
And this is without the other anciliary costs and benefits. Aside from the propaganda value, including the value of Ukraine having a high-profile success near the end of the American election cycle (good news encourages continued support, when the Russian strategy has been hoping for a negative narrative to encourage American withdrawal of support), there's also the matter of western aid policy. The Ukrainians have been faced with real significant limitations on how some weapons can be used from Ukraine into Russia, such as what would allow them to go after Russian airfields. (Or- more recently- how the Kharkiv offensive was allowed to build up strength because the Ukrainians weren't allowed to fire into the clearly massing forces.) The Ukrainian offensive- in which various systems are now being used from within Russia in Russia- has had such a muted response, that this will very likely lead to relaxed restrictions in the future. If it does so, then Ukrainian gains in better utilizing western aid will further increase their overall defensive effectiveness against the Russians, and mitigate some of Russia's main enduring advantages (such as military airfields for the glide bomb campaign.)
Put all together, and I think your question of 'is this a defensible salient' is a qualified yes on an operational level (maneuver defense is a form of defense), but a much stronger yes on a campaign level (undercutting offenses in other regions by requiring commitment of Russian reserves), and especially at a strategic level (shaping western weapons restriction policy, information/vibes impact of the US election season).
But it's not necessarily the right question. It's not whether any square kilometer of the salient will be held- it's that by putting the Russians in the position of having to take it back in the first place, multiple defensive interests have likely been advanced.
Hope that helps.
/
Returning back to your specific questions-
But it's not clear to me what the strategic objective of this operation is. Is it essentially a feint to draw Russian troops away from defending conquered Ukrainian territory?
No.
In military terms, a feint is a diversionary attack to draw enemy attention away from the decisive operation. There has to be an intended 'real effort' the feint is supposed to enable via the distraction. A feint with unexpected can translate into a genuine attack, and a feint needs enough support behind it to be credible to work as a diversion in the first place, but a feint is always in support of some other primary operation.
Instead, the primary purpose of this attack is almost certainly not to draw Russian troops away from defending conquered Ukrainian territory, but to draw Russian troops away from attacking not-conquered Ukrainian territory.
The nature of the positional struggle further south is that the Russians and Ukrainians there both have significant defensive setups with overlapping systems. The same factor that has prevented Russian breakthroughs despite months of incremental advances at high attritional cost also prevents Ukrainian breakthroughs. However, even on the offensive Russia needs reserves on those fronts to sustain the advance (as if there weren't the reserves to replace attrition, the front forces wouldn't be launching the sort of attritional attacks they have), and were Ukraine to attack there, the Russian reserves powering the advance would also be there, in more favorable defensive systems, to counter the counter-attack.
Given that a significant part of the Russian overlapping systems are systems like electronic warfare equipment to mitigate western-equipment advantages in things like precision targetting or drones, large artillery formations, and other defenses, the same X Ukrainian forces committed to the Kursk attack would almost certainly not have had the impact were they committed further south.
What the Ukrainian offensive has done is force the Russians into a very awkward position of taking forces that would otherwise be supporting the attacks further south, and bringing them around to Kursk. The Russians could conceivably try to rely on the normal conscript cycle manpower for this- except the political costs to Putin of such is why the Russians switch from the first mobilization conscription wave to the current volunteer model- and taking the forces from eastern Ukraine, reduces the ability to advance in Eastern Ukraine.
Is the plan to claim Russian land to negotiate land swaps with when the time comes for peace talks?
No.
In terms of 'claim,' the Ukrainians aren't making the claims the land is theirs. That doesn't mean return wouldn't be a part of negotiations, or relevant, but this isn't a 'you claimed our province so we'll claim yours.' (Probably not what you meant precisely, but it's important to be clear.)
Also no, in that the land doesn't need to be held until the point of peace talks to serve the purpose of taking it.
Per the points above about the different types of defense and the difficulties of a counter-attack on different parts of the border, the land itself is not the point. The land is a context, a battlespace with different advantages/disadvantages, but more importantly one with implications for Russian force allocation and utilization further south. Even if Russia takes back all of the Kursk salient next week, that's a week that those Russian forces aren't spending contributing to attacks further south.
I don't see how it directly gets the Ukrainians any closer to their goal of evicting the Russians from Ukraine.
Several ways, though that's not to say any one of these is 'the plan' or the decisive reason the Ukrainians did it.
Among other things, the offensive has or will likely-
-Be a more efficient attritional tradeoff of Ukrainian forces versus Russians than would be used further south, at a relatively low risk
The current Kursk attack is really not that big of a force danger to the Ukrainian forces involved, because the primary tool Russia relies on to drive up the casualties- artillery- isn't present, and many of the compounding factors- prepared defenses, covered minefields, EW to mitigate drones, etc.,- also are largely absent. Without a significant maneuver capability to isolate and cut off the Ukrainian forces, and the Russian mechanized forces are both committed to the front and have downgraded over the years to reduce that- the risk to the thousands of Ukrainians involved in this is... relatively low. Even if/when the Russians bring the forces to bear to push them out, it will generally be within the Urkainian ability to do a fighting withdrawal, picking when and where to fight until they go back behind the border (at which point if the Russians were going to invade that way, they would have before this).
Instead, the Urkainians have a significant opportunity for more selective engagements in more favorable conditions due to the Russian requirements to move forces quicker, and thus without the sort of defenses that exist on the static front. We've seen this with ambushes, the flanking / surrounding / surrender issues, the columns attacked by US precision weapons, and so on. Russia's mechanized capabilities are already heavily degraded, and their motorized forces are very vulnerable in transit when the western missiles / drones aren't being as countered by EW / drones, and the Russians are having to make that transit.
Even outside of the 'does it relieve pressure further south' dynamic, this is likely to be a more favorable attrition opportunity, and the long-term Ukrainian strategy continues to be a fundamentally attrition-based strategy in which Ukraine attrits Russian offensive capabilities (such as the forces that will be moved to conduct the counter-attack) while Western production (and thus potential aid) spools up. (It feels trite to still be saying this, but 2024 is / has been since last year expected to be the year of maximum relative Russian advantage vis-a-vis Ukraine+ backers on a production footing, as the Western investments in increasing artillery production and such are expected to start resulting in expanded production next year and grow at faster rates than Russia. Hence why Russia's strategy this year was higher manpower attrition rates than in 2023, as this year is the one with which they wanted to set conditions for potential talks with a potential new US administration / after the European elections of 24).
-Force Putin into politically difficult positions that reveal the limits of his manpower strategy to win the war by volunteer-attrition
The Ukrainian offensive was only possible because Russia has functionally bled every other front and posting in Russia white to the degree that it thinks it can get away with. While Russia has demonstrated it's willingness to keep burning through it's manpower in high-attrition rates- and we've seen the increase in recruitment offers as a monetary example of the escalating costs in both casualty and monetary terms- as long as the conflict was constrained to the established front in, say, Donetsk it was a suitable enough solution. What the Kursk incursion has demonstrated is the limits of this manpower sourcing, as the ability to fill the Russian manpower needs on a relatively narrow front doesn't mean that the only manpower Russia needs is on that narrow front. If Putin needs to garrison the frontier, he's going to need considerably more manpower- and probably the use of the conscription cycles.
This matters, because Russia lost approximately 800,000 people in 2022 not from combat, but as mass emmigration events after starting the war and the mobilization. Putin has very repeatedly not repeated the experience, but transitioned to a money-for-recruitment model after the prison-pipeline largely died out. Putin is very sensitive to the Russian public being directly involved in the war, which is what the use of Conscripts also entails, and has repeatedly demonstrated a preference to decrease military effectiveness over compelling that sort of service. Forcing Putin into that position has multiple benefits, especially since the Russian limiting factor is now the reactivation of equipment, not personnel, so even a mobilization wave wouldn't produce a practically equipped army for anything but high-political-cost garrison duty.
-Undercut Russia's information strategy of the year of presenting the entire year of one of one-sided Russian advances
Russian force utilization over the last year has been focused far more on consistency of marginal gains over military efficacy over a multi-year campaign, with an expenditure rate that almost certainly couldn't be repeated next year bar significantly more inflows from outside parties at considerable cost. The most likely (competent) reason for this is trying to frame the information environment for potential talks next year in the framework of 'Ukraine should make all the concessions, as we made all the advances last year and they were unable to do anything.'
Instead, the counter-attack (this late in the year even) illustrated Russia's continued weaknesses, demonstrated that Ukraine still had the political and material ability to launch meaningful attacks, and that Russia's position of strength in one front isn't a position to be conflated everywhere/elsewhere. That matters not only in terms of negotiations, including resisting diplomatic pressure form those who want the Ukrainians to make further territorial concessions in the name of peace, which is the Russian theory of victory on how to compel Ukraine to capitulate when the Russian military has demonstrated it really can't do so miltiarily.
Note that this also undercuts some of the anti-Ukrainian narratives in the global information environment. One of the common narratives since the start of the war has been that Ukraine is on the cusp of a failure cascade for lack of forces / equipment to resist, and that every operation is throwing what they have away and etc. etc. etc. Successful counter-offensives, even 'small' ones, counter this by demonstrating that the force generation surpluses needed to take to the offense and not just defend still exists. This will likely be more relevant in the future when rebutting criticisms of the 2023 counter-offensive as inherently doomed to fail, as the current Kursk offensive is demonstrating that offensives are potentially successful, and that the factors that determined whether Ukraine can succeed are factors that can be accounted for (say- having the right aid policies to counter russian capabilities), rather than being beyond control or recreation (dismissing the 2022 offensives as flukes).
-Bolster western supporters by generating a high-publicity win
This goes into aid politics. Just as the Russian propaganda incentive has been to present the conflict as a futile struggle with an inevitable conclusion that Western countries shouldn't bother sending Ukraine aid for because of the futility, Ukraine has an incentive to show partners that it's weapons enable good results. People like backing underdogs, but also winners, and especially underdogs that can produce wins, which improves the (foreign donor) political support for continuing to donate aid. Sometimes launching offenses isn't even a 'we do it for the fans' priority, but 'the patreons demand it of us' dynamic, which was seen in 2023 when the Ukrainian offensive that year had a degree of western pressure to conduct to justify the sizable aid buildup.
Even though the Ukrainian offensive is not presenting itself as relying on western kit (to avoid donor fears of escalation), it is being enabled by western kit elsewhere, and in turn facilitating future aid delivery in a way that committing the forces further south wouldn't.
(If you really wanted to expand this argument, you could claim that generating a win is intended to help the Democrats in the US election, as the Ukraine support is a broadly more-popular-than-not thing for the Democratic coalition, and that a high profile success may indirectly boost the Democrat's prospects. However, there's no particular reason to believe this was the motive, as opposed to a welcome anciliary benefit, as the motives for the Ukrainians to act remain.)
-Improve western weapon efficiency by breaking down sensitivity restrictions by demonstration
One of the dynamics of the western aid to Ukraine has been the amount of usage-restrictions imposed in the name of avoiding 'escalation' with Russia. I use the term in quotations because there is now a multi-year pattern as Russian explicit/implicit threats if a category of aid were to reach Ukraine, the aid reaching Ukraine, and the threats not materializing- rather the threats served primarily to delay the arrival and limit the utility of capabilities provided. This has had multiple operational impacts, ranging from undercutting the 2023 counteroffensive (Russians were able to use helicopter aviation much more aggressively against the forces trying to breach minefields because ATACMs and similar missiles that could disrupt airfields were being witheld because they could range into Russia; the ATACMs were unlocked later in the offensive), or even this year's 2024 Russian Kharkiv offensive, in which Russian buildup was observed and well within potential fire range, but western aid restrictions prohibited attacks onto Russian territory where the buildup was occuring (the restriction was relaxed for the adjacent areas).
What the current offensive is doing is further breaking down the Western weapon usage taboos by demonstrating that the sky doesn't fall if you attack into Russia. It's notable that the Ukrainians are mostly doing this with Soviet-era kit for this reason, as it limits the political perception risk, but likewise the Russian response is, well, something the Ukrainians can plausibly point to to justify being able to strike military targets in Russia.
This matters because the current restriction that would mean quite a bit is the ability to more aggressively target Russian airfields not just in Crimea, but Russia proper, where the Russians have been launching the glide-bomb campaign. The Russian glide bombs are one of the main Russian advantage points in the current context, arguably more so than artillery due to the heavy glide bombs ability to destroy fortifications, and being able to use western weapons against such airfields would matter.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
That was part of the 1994 Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich. It wasn't just 'discouragement' either- it was a organizational-restructuring, as the rules of Congress were changed to facilitate frequent travel out of DC. Most notably, Congressional business workflows were centered on the mid-week, so that key votes were Tuesday-Thursday, to make Monday/Friday travel days more viable.
It was part of 'proving independence from Washington' and 'staying in touch with your constituents.' It is the oft-forgotten root of regular complaints that Congress spends too little time in Washington compared to the past, and the associated complaints that Congress gets less done (because they are present less) and don't know eachother as well. On the other hand, it arguably contributes to the dynamic of voters loving their congressperson but hating congress.
It was also, critically, a period where Republicans were also incentivized to not bring their families to D.C., which in turns means the wives and children who stay behind aren't culturally socialized into the blue-tribe-dominated national capital region. But it also means, by extension, that Democratic representative families under the same dynamics aren't socializing with more red-leaning counterparts, and are free to be even bluer influences on their Congressional-spouses.
This is an oft-forgotten / underappreciated rules-level dynamic of national-level political centralization and elite-consensus.
Keeping key elites spending time together and away from their own power-bases that could foster a sense of disconnect from the central authority has been a national cohesion strategy since before Louis XIV and Versailles. This helped political centralization by giving the monarch an easier time keeping an eye on everyone if they were in one part. But it also allowed for political homogenization/consensus-building/shared-identity cultivation of a common French identity amongst elites, as the French nobility were forced by proximity (and tactical political interests) to get along and socialize. Court politics is infamous in fiction for political infighting and drama, but it does create paradigms for collective understandings, interests, and identities, hence the divide of the french estates leading to the French revolution. Nobles infight against eachother, but unite in common cause against challenges to their collective interests and privileges.
Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels. If you're not missing key votes because you're spending time with constituents- because Congressional workflows are focused on Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday execution- then you're not losing your chance at valuable appointments to powerful Congressional committees. The lower the opportunity cost of not-being in the capital, the greater the opportunity-gains of being elsewhere for fundraising / political events / etc. And, again, you're away from your family less if you're free to return to them more often.
These are changes that the Congressional Democrats have kept even when they recaptured Congress. They get many of the same benefits as well. And as the D.C. area is something like 90% Democratic for a variety of reasons, it's hard to see them convincing (or, frankly, forcing) the Republicans to revert to the pre-Gingrich status quo in the name of homogenizing them in an expected blue direction.
Interestingly, it's also a dynamic being actively pursued in the reverse by the movement of property, and not just people.
You can arguably see an implicit effort-to-reverse Federal consensus-centralization ongoing right now, as Trump attempts to push the federal bureaucracy away from the capital region.
One of the less-commented efforts the Trump administration is pursuing is moving federal agencies outside of the DC area and to other states. This has been overshadowed by the media coverage of the personnel management, but the property management is (almost) as important.
Among the earliest executive orders was a direction for agencies to propose relocations away from DC and to other states. This purportedly on cost-reasons. DC property is expensive to maintain, employee allowances are higher to make up for the regional cost of living, etc. The actual cost of moving has to be balanced against savings are likely to provide, but states have an incentive to take some of that cost for their own long-term gain in getting the relocated agencies.
Almost as importantly, Congress persons have an incentive to approve federal agency relocations to the benefit of their own state. Even Democratic politicians who might personally hate Trump. Which is to say, Federal government divestment from DC offers bargaining chips / horses to trade in the upcoming year(s) of budget negotiations.
That this is also is likely to have an employee-composition impact, as the hyper-blue DC environment those agencies recruit and socialize and network within get replaced with more purple environments that are geographically dispersed, is probably not going to be a publicized or recognized until it's as locked-in as the Gingrich Congressional travel changes.
As has been seen with some shutdowns like the USAID shutdown, DC-based federal employees have often indicated they want to stay in the DC area. This is natural. Even if they were offered an opportunity to keep their jobs if agencies were relocated instead of shutdown, some percent would refuse and seek other employment in DC. This is just a matter of statistics. It is also an area of precedent. In the Trump 1 administration, nearly 90% of DC-based Bureau of Land Management employees retired or quit rather than relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.
That's bad if you think an equivalent dynamic to, say, the DC Headquarters of the Justice Department would lose vital experience and expertise and informal coordination with other agencies. On the other hand, if you don't think the headquarters of the US Justice Department should be rooted in the swamp that is 90% blue, and less than a mile from where a 'Black Live Matter' mural used to be maintained on the street...
And once departments are separated, the sort of informal coordination that can occur if you and a friend/ally you know in another part of the government can meet in the same town also goes away. Inter-government lobbying is a lot harder if you are cities apart. Inter-department coordination is also, and almost as importantly, a lot harder to do without a document trail.
And this is where one could infer a non-stated motive for the resistance-shy Trump. One of the only reasons the US electorate learned that the Biden administration white house was coordinating with the Georgia anti-Trump case despite denials was because one of the Georgia prosecutor assistances invoiced the White House for the travel expenses for in-person engagements. In-person meetings, in turn, are one of the ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests or Congressional subpoenas for communications over government systems.
This is where the Versailles metaphor comes back, but as an inverse of sorts. It was easier for Louis the XIVth to keep an eye on and manage the nobility when they were in one place. They were scheming, sure, but he could keep watch of them in a single physical location where he controlled the coordination contexts. Trump / the Republicans do not control the coordination context of DC. They can, however, increase political control over the bureaucracy by physically separating it across multiple physical locations, where they have easier means to monitor inter-node coordination.
It is also an effort that will be exceptionally hard for the Democrats to reverse, if they try to. It is a lot easier to divest and reorganize government institutions when you have a trifecta than when you don't. It is also much easier to give up federal property in DC to the benefit of states than it is to get state Congressional representatives to vote to strip their states of jobs and inflows for the sake of DC.
Which means that federal agencies that depart DC will probably not return in the near future. And the longer they stay away, the longer that local employment hiring filters into organizational cultures at the lowest levels. The more that Federal employees have their spouses and children shaped by the less-blue-than-DC environments, and thus shape them in turn. The less engaged, and involved, they can be in the beltway culture.
The Trump administration DC divestment are arguably going to have long-term effects on affected parts of the federal bureaucracy on par with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution affects on Congress in the 90's. Affected agencies will be less compositionally composed of, less socially exposed to, and less culturally aligned to Blue-dominated DC in ways that will only become apparent decades from now.
A significant wing of the Democratic party with media allies has committed to a deligitimization campaign of the Supreme Court, specifically targetting Republican justices. Tactically this is to pressure the justicies to recuse themselves from specific cases, more broadly an attempt to scandalize them into resigning in general so that they can be replaced by more compliant partisans, and even more broadly delegitimize Supreme Court rulings against the Democratic partisan interests and build support for future potential court packing schemes.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
You took professionalism ethics in your education, did you not? About how professionals get social trust and deference due to not only their specialized skills, but the self-regulation they entail amongst themselves to meet minimum standards of competence and ethics to be deserving of that trust, and holding those who fail to account?
What you are seeing is the consequence of a failure to maintain professionalism, and professional accountability, across multiple professions. And part of that is a result of people just keeping their head down when people try to hijack the profession for non-professional purposes. Social trust has been lost, and deference is being revoked.
Dismissing it as revenge would be part of the problem that lost the public trust. You are not entitled public trust- no one is.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
This is your reminder that you are literally on business day 3 since Biden dropped out, and still in the midst of the initial Democratic media campaign push. If you're vibing off of what you're seeing and hearing in the media, especially the larger share of which is already Democrat aligned, you're basically just partaking in anecdotal bias of a bandwagon effect.
The American political narrative machine has worked like this for years: a surge of high-tempo media insertions when there's a planned push, down to spamming the youtube commercial adds, and then an ebb as the narrative push ends and messages prepare to shift. It will occur again, and continue, and keep continuing throughout the election cycle. If you think the election is turning because the Democratic-aligned media is being optimistic rather than pressimistic, then you need a better barometer of the health of the parties involved.
On my side - Republicans are high on copium, seems to not have been prepared for Kamala, lack message and message discipline, and are on the defensive. JD Vance seems to be bombing. And for it - the election moved from landslide to at best narrow win. I still think that she is the second worst possible candidate after Joe Biden but probably ok enough to win.
If you ever thought the election was going to be a landslide, you were already high on hopium. The withdrawal effects may be nasty, but they don't make everything to the contrary copium.
Republicans don't have a message for countering Kamala yet, in no small part because Kamala doesn't have a message to be countered. Kamala Harris has been a practical non-entity for most of the broader electorate for the last few years, and even in her emergence as the Democratic nominee she still hasn't taken a meaningful stance on, well, anything. Right now she's the not-Joe Biden / not-Donald Trump candidate, but the former is not a policy position, and the later not being enough is precisely why Biden resigned.
The Democratic Party is not united simply because the party elites insist it is, and Harris is going to have to take positions for the sake of managing her party coalition. Joe Biden could be consistently attacked because his coalition politics were stable: Harris's is not, and attacking her for things that she's not taking a stand on is a waste of money and makes her job (putting the coalition back together again) easier, whereas Harris has a well-earned reputation of bad office/coalition politics to leverage over time.
The Democratic convention is right around the corner, and the Democratic-aligned media is going to present it as a success no matter what does or does not happen, just as they were intent on presenting the Republican convention a dismal failure from the start. The story for the next weeks is- regardless of Republican attack adds- going to be the Democrats coming back together and uniting and how this is a new chapter.
The Republican campaign, in turn, is going to find the things to pick at. But as this is Kamala's first real time for national attention, given her earlier flameouts, the national-level criticism is going to follower her taking national-visibility stances.
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
On the American-Mexican border, this year the Biden administration implemented a policy intended to allow a stronger/politically-more-viable legal basis for ejecting migrants. In short, they created a remote-asylum application system as part of broader remote-immigration-permit systems. The nominal position is that migrants are to request the migration / asylum remotely from their own country, and then wait for the response of yay/nay. If they attempt to illegally immigrate before their application is complete, their digital-application can be rejected and they can be immediately deported as bad-faith applicants, and if they attempt to apply for asylum at the border without trying the app, they can be sent back to their countries and told to apply via the system.
The premise was somewhat undermined by various Biden exceptions to give various groups special permissions to stay, and the sheer numbers that kept coming after a temporary pause after the number of deportation flights was contrasted to the number of arrivals, and the sanctuary city migrant-bussing fiasco.
South of the American border, a number of different dynamics are taking place, centered primarily on spreading awareness via social media of safe-ish and commercially available migration services that have increased both awareness and perception of safety, sometimes with government facilitation.
Among other things-
-The Darian Gap, the link between Colombia and Panama, has seen functional guide services and entire social media channels and migration-facilitation industries between boats and forest guides and supply traders. The social media awareness of viable routes, legal strategies such as claiming asylum, and analysis/assessments of the US permissiveness of migrants once you reach there, are widespread. As with most businesses, as businesses scale, they compete and improve in pursuit of profit and client-share.
-Local governments in the Darian Gap, Panama, and Costa Rica, being overwhelmed if they try to stop or hinder the flow and at risk of criminal malingering if they just ignore it, have gradually adopted policies of functionally regulating migration flow independent of national level (let alone American) desires. A migrant you stop is your problem; a migrant you charge for a clean hotel room before moving on is a revenue source, and less likely to be working with the cartels against you. Local governments are in some places functionally legalizing/displacing the more harmful criminal types.
-Nicaragua in particular has started a racket of direct migrant shuttle flights from high-migration capitals to Nicaragua. In much the same way of the Belarusian migration crisis bringing Iraqis to the Polish border while the Belarusian government got the money for the 'tour packages,' Nicaragua basically relaxed visa-arrival restrictions and starting flying in planeloads of migrants from countries like Haiti and Cuba, and then gives the migrants a short amount of time to get out of the country starting from halfway up central america. Naturally Ortega makes his cuts, and while the US has pressured some airlines to stop, there's still plenty of money.
-Building on public awareness, the US domestic squabble of the Texas bussing of migrants to sanctuary cities was an international highlight on the, well, 'free reception' on hand if you did arrive in the US and reach a Sanctuary city. When internationally recognizable cities like New York complain that they can't continue to spend thousands of dollars a month per migrant providing food, housing, job permisions, and etc., that's not a problem- that's an advertisement to get it while you can.
-Finally, there has been increasing regional coordination between migration-transit countries on the subject. Some of this has been urged by the US, and some has been about, well, using migration as a way to urge changes in US policy that interest the coordinating powers. Not too long ago, there was a Mexican conference with many of the migration-sources, with one of the resolution points asserting a general right to migrate- implicitly obliging the US to not only accept migrants in general, but actively facilitate safe routes and legal avenues into the US. (Other points included removing the current US legal structure that gives greater asylum weight to people from repressive/anti-US countries, like Cuba.)
Put it together, and migration to the US has become hybrid government-private commercial business, with spreading awareness and perceptions of safety and reliability, with highly public 'win' conditions and regional governments sympathetic to further facilitating it.
What should the DOJ have done? Wasted a bunch of money prosecuting another 200 cases it wasn't going to win?
Yes. Unironically, unabashedly, yes. There would be far less perception of a bureaucratic-driven double standard if the Jan 6 treatment had been done to equivalent rioters years before. That would be worth far more than the money saved.
The question of the thread is how to get an opposition party to buy into the legitimacy of the government of the victorious party. The value of a federal prosecution for state legitimacy in this context doesn't come from securing a conviction, it comes from showing the commitment of the government to seek to bring people to court on the basis of what they did, rather than on the basis of who they protested against. Appearing to turn a blind eye to one's own partisan faction and what they do against their political opponents is about the worst thing you can do for the legitimacy of a legal institution.
If the Justice Department sits on and does nothing with 200 cases against the opposition party, the opposition narrative has 200 examples of the other team- the winning team, in this case- not being prosecuted on the basis of acts conducted. When prosecution isn't being pursued for acts not in dispute, 'we wouldn't secure a conviction' is a poor shield to charges that the real reason is 'we didn't want to.' Especially when there would be plenty of people publicly acknowledging partisan sympathies from within the government, and especially if the opposition would be charged for equivalent acts later.
On the other hand, if the Justice Department brings up the evidence and prosecutes 200 cases and the DC jury fails to convict a single one, the opposition who lost will still be citing 200 cases of the Justice Department being on their side and insisting on the propriety of the Justice Department. This insistence will not only negate years of hostile accusations as to why the government didn't even attempt the case, but has all the usual psychological effects of challenging and/or undermining people who would later go from lauding the Justice Department's willingness to challenge bad actors to (when those were the other side) to accusing the Justice Department of uneven handling (when it was the oppsition side).
That DC juries would jury nullify is a separate issue, and a far better problem to have from the perspective of government legitimacy. If DC juries intend to consistently demonstrated partisan animosity, there are ways the government (Federal or the Congress under the majority party) can respond to that, much as how jury reforms were imposed on the civil rights south to ensure fairness. What is more important is that if DC juries are the problem, opposition party ire will be focused on them, and not the federal government itself.
The legitimacy of the government is considerably better off if a lack of justice is seen as the fault of the jury pool that voted 90% Democratic than if the government simply accepted it. One is a scandal for the Democratic Party, and one is a scandal for the state.
Why do you believe this would be a reasonable- as in, reason-driven- as opposed to a pathetic- as in, pathos-driven- compromise?
Keep in mind that weaponized emotional appeals- including appeals to sympathy for social compact violators and shaming campaigns against those not showing enough pity towards preferred beneficiaries- have been a hallmark of the American culture war for decades now, and which the current political context is part of a political revolt against.
This is particularly relevant to this example, as a 'let's compromise on amnesty for immigration reform' was bargained in the past, except that the amnesty given did not lead to actual immigration enforcement afterwards.
Now your proposal is a compromise of further amnesty instead of enforcement for... what, exactly?
Remember that the post-2020 US election Time article "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election"? Somewhere between a victory lap and credit-claiming at a time it was generally thought Trump's political prospects were dead, it was a rare look behind the scenes of retroactively-admitted coordinated political obstruction and shaping efforts.
It was also the article with the memorable distinction of-
They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.
Well, the New York Times on Sunday published a more pre-emptive form of democratic fortification: The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started.
The article in short is a look at different wings of the Democratic Party apparatus, and steps they are taking in anticipation of a Trump victory to foil the predicted efforts of the 2025 Project. Some of these fears seem a good deal less grounded than others- Trump has been an abortion moderate such that it's hard to see why a Democratic governor would need to stock years of abortion supplies in a state warehouse beyond political theater- but then the article is quite likely a form of political theater. As far as election-year advertising goes, it's both a 'here are all the horrible things that could happen' fear campaign-
If Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries; sending federal troops into Democratic cities; carrying out mass deportations; building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees; making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists; and expanding and centralizing executive power.
-with the ACLU specifically focusing on four areas of potential lawfare-
That exercise, he said in an interview, led the group to focus on four areas, for which it is drafting potential legal filings. Those areas are Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigrants in the country without legal permission; the potential to further curtail access to abortion; firing civil servants for political reasons; and the possibility that he would use troops to suppress protests.
-but all with a back-edge 'but we thwarted him before and can do it again' of tribal-protection promise.
Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread that they may have to resist him all over again.
Not necessarily optimistic, but a 'we will fight for you' solidarity / call for support framing.
While there is the occasional (potentially deliberate) amusing word choice in ways that anyone who has used the term the Cathedral might appreciate-
“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. He added, “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”
The core strategies include the following, none of which are particularly surprising but which are good to see identified clearly in advance:
-Passing executive actions in the Biden administration before certain timelines so that Trump can't immediately revert them
-Litigation waves to tie things in court, with recruitment of sympathetic plaintiffs with likely standing already occuring
-Implicitly by virtue of the acknowledged past strategies and current participants, more protests
-More explicitly legal preparations to prevent/limit federal intervention in protests
-A national-scale counter-ICE network to disrupt immigration raids
-Pre-emptively doing self-auditing of activist group finances in preparation of politically motivated IRS scrutiny
-Various state-based nullification theory application (such as 'inter-state commerce doesn't apply to FDA if I already have the goods in-state')
-Use of Never-Trump 'ex-Republicans' groups as part of the Democratic network, especially the Principles First organization.
(Principles First was a Never Trump wing of the Republican Party associated with Liz Cheney that started in 2022 during the anti-Trump former Republican establishment's efforts to reassert control / torpedo Trump's post-presidential prospects by cooperating with the Democrat-led impeachment trial. Since then, and her fall from the Republican Party, it's been casting itself as an alternative to CPAC. Interestingly it also works in concert with Ranked Choice voting lobbying. (In the US, ranked choice voting is often, but not always, associated with the Democratic Party, at least in the sense of pushing for it in Red / Purple, but not Blue, states.)
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
This is all occurring while the Democrats have loudly signaled, and been mocked relentlessly for, plans to find inroads into the minds of young men.
On one hand, I can understand this, but on the other, I have to question the idea that somehow young, disengaged, skeptical men will respond positively if the Democrats only... checks notes... force paid advertisements into youtube videos, in-game video game ads, and sports and gaming podcasts.
These are three hobby spaces that are notoriously known for being escapist hobby vectors for people who do not want to be bothered with Serious Things. Paid ads are not exactly popular in any of them, and the anti-ad industry that, by its nature, is skeptical of establishment forces (that would prefer such bypasses not exist).
One of those spaces in particlar- video gaming spaces- was the subject of a multi-year culture war in which Democratic party allies circled the wagons against a non-trivial part of the consumer base who, among other grievances, felt their hobby space was being encroached upon by partisans who didn't care for them.
It really begs the question of if the person making the proposal had any awareness of Gamergate back in the day, or if they remember the progressive framing but think this is a good idea anyway, or... just what this is supposed to be besides a grift for a wave of blocked/skipped ads that people allready block/skip in mass.
The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times. One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'
One of the limits of a lot of the recent discussion has been that it focuses on the Trump tariffs as a bilateral or even unilateral effect, i.e. how bad this will be for the US specifically. Part of that is understandable- the way you generally try and end a trade war is to sap political willingness from the pursuer, and convince them it's worse for them than pursuing. Totally normal, and I'm not implying that's necessarily wrong on any sort of factual or ethical level, though such arguments do have an incentive to exaggerate. (You can probably find plenty of online threats of, say, the EU cutting the US service exports at the knees in retaliation- instead, the EU so far as gone after certain red state good exports, a fraction of the fraction. This is a strategy tailored for political effect, not maximizing cost, which is what discussions/threats over the service economy exports would have been. However, those are focused more in Blue states, so...)
But what those types of arguments don't address is that the mountains of trade goods and oceans of trade flows will go elsewhere, and when they do that will cause second and third order trade conflicts that don't directly involve the initial party.
Take the US goods exports to China. On page 5 it breaks down various categories by share and volume of trade. While no category measured in the billions of US dollars should be considered 'small', note what some of the larger categories are. Food products. Oil and gas. Basic chemicals. Other forms of input products.
A lot of these are relatively fungible goods, but also where global demands itself is relatively static. If China refuses to buy, say, oil and gas from the US, that doesn't mean that china does without and stops all things that previously used the US export. It means China pays for an equivalent amount of oil and gas from somewhere else, possibly outbiding other market equilibriums for the privilege. Which takes that oil and gas off the market, and leaves the customers who would want them available for... the US oil and gas not going to China.
Now apply this to other categories. If you price-out, say, medical equipment via tariffs, then either you go without or you go elsewhere. If you go elsewhere, then you're taking from that status quo. The American goods are, nominally, available to fill the void. There may be complications- quality standard disputes, language and labeling barriers, etc.- but the underlying fundamental demand (the people who had been willing to buy Good X before China came in and bought it), and the potential supply (the American goods no longer going to china) exists.
At the end of the day, economic actors don't either produce to make maximum products or not produce at all. They will continue to produce as long as even decreased margins are preferable to no income. As long as it makes economic sense for the producers to keep producing rather than shut down, the goods will continue to be produced for the market while substitute transactions are sought. This is why input-producers, such as Russia, are often able to survive disruptions with major established trade partners as long as they have the ability to get their goods to global markets. The former-importer still needs to import something like the no-longer imported [thing], and the former-exporter can now export to whomever the former-importer is buying up the [thing] from.
This substitute process is generally not economically efficient. It costs more, in absolute and opportunity costs. It often gives less profit due to higher transaction costs (though politically-influenced deals are a wild card). This is less beneficial to most people involved, though the intermediaries who can make the connections can make a killing. There will be all sorts of compliance costs to try and access the demand that opened up when China bought out [thing] from [elsewhere], whether it's relabeling to new languages or trying to regulate regulatory approval or whatever else. Not all businesses will be able to survive that transition, and will be bought up or close down when they otherwise would have carried on. The people who say this entails high economic costs are not lying.
But that economic inefficiency does not change that an absolute mountain of goods are about to be redirected and crash into national markets that are magnitudes smaller in scale, and upset the political-economic equilibrium in different ways.
It also is not an argument that is specific to the US. A point was made that the US goods to China were in some respects relatively fungible. People gonna eat and put gas in cars to go to work or fuel factories. Demand for these is relatively inelastic. If China buys food and gas from elsewhere, then elsewhere will want to buy food and gas to make up what they would have been consuming but China purchases.
But if the US isn't buying from China due to the trade war...
Above I linked a product to show the US exports to China. If you looked at it, did you notice anything that ought to have been there, but wasn't? I'll link again. Can you spot it? It breaks down exports by type, exports by US state sending to China, exports volumes...
Can you find the word 'import', and find where it is used outside of the context of what China imports from the US, i.e. US exports?
Here is another (Biden-era) product of exports and imports by category.
Three of the top US import from China categories include-
- Machine appliances ($268.5 billion)
- Textiles ($50.3 billion)
- Misc. Manufactured Items ($69.4 billion)
$388 billion dollars, or $388,000 million dollars, is a significant-but-not-overwhelming amount to the scale of the US economy, which in 2023 the world bank estimated was over $27,360,000*... million USD.
*Edit: used wrong box in first post, corrected. Same point to argument.
But if you sort that wiki-list by size and scroll down, that $388,000 million starts to match and then even exceed, by multiple magnitudes, the GDPs of the smaller countries in the world. Which- if the China-originated formerly US-bound trade flow of manufactured goods has to go elsewhere- are not going to be the only places that good surplus will redirect. After all, countries can't subsist on nothing but machine appliances, market saturation will be reached, which means going to the next markets and so on.
Except, some of those countries like having their own manufacturing economies of their own. And would want to protect their own markets from Chinese dumping. When even the EU is in internal conflict over the implications of the forecasted wave of Chinese products no longer going to the US...
Manufactured goods aren't necessarily fungible in the same way that production inputs are. Arguably if the Chinese had the same sort of tariffs overall as everyone else, they'd keep (or even slightly grow) the same general market share of American imports for these categories as long as it remained a roughly even playing field with everyone else. But the nature of the US-China trade war in particular vis-a-vis the rest is that as the US and China put higher tariffs on eachother, then every exporter-to-the-US isn't hitting the same impact. Americans will still buy goods, even if at higher prices, just not as efficiently. Which also means that those manufactured goods that previously would have gone to [place] because China had such a share of the US market are now subject to go to US as the China market share in the US is up for grabs.
Which also means that there's fewer goods in [other markets] even as China's manufactured goods are looking for a place to go.
Anti-dumping practices exist for reasons, but it's less obvious that it isn't the US most at threat of price-dumping. And while the World Trade Organization has historically tried to discipline anti-dumping practices, the WTO dispute resolution mechanism (i.e. judges to make rulings) wasn't exactly resurrected before Trump came back. Which is to say, there's no WTO authority to make a formal and binding judgement against you, the national politician, taking actions in your national (and domestic political) interest.
None of this is an argument that the US will 'win' a global trade conflageration. Whether you think that's because there is no way to win / that Trump won't cut any deals / whatever reason, this isn't an argument about what will happen for the US. The US outcome is separate from the point.
The point is that the more that China's trade-to-the-US is diverted by the US-China trade war, but still produced by the economic incentives within China to keep producing, the more that will put China into its own trade tensions / conflicts with other states, as it seeks to have them absorb the consumption of China exports that the US no longer is. It's not like China has no cards to play- the rare earths mineral supply chain has been a topic of concern for years, as China has used it to coerce and punish neighbors on various issues.
And that will have its own interesting follow-on effects, both for the success and political dynamics for pressuring countries to accept the export flood not going to the US, but also the impacts to states that resist those pressures. But also the impacts on relations between those countries who took the Chinese exports and their neighbors who might not want the same sort of deal and now face overflow from their neighbors who they previously had a tolerable equilibrium with.
That is the sort of global trade issues that I feel have been under-recognized in the last week's focus on arguing about the American-specific element of the Trump tariffs. It's not all about the United States, and the longer the trade system upheaval goes on, the less proximal the US (and Trump) will be to future, predictable, trade conflicts.
As always whenever US military recruitment woes comes up, it's relevant to bring up that something like 80% of new recruits come from a family where someone else has served. The implication of this isn't that the US has a racial demographic recruitment option, but a familial one: that families that once would have encouraged children to join, are no longer doing so / encouraging them not to do so.
Failing to work around this issue makes many of the options presented pretentiously comedic rather than serious, because the audience that needs to be convinced isn't the recruits- it's the already-separated family members who are dissuading recruitment.
Behind a paywall, but one of the better breakdowns of the US recrutiment issues from the WSJ.
Honey wake up. The US Fiscal Year 2026 Budget War started today.
Earlier today, the Trump Administration published its discretionary budget request for next year, fiscal year 2026 (FY26). The USA Today has a media-level summary here. You are probably going to be seeing various other coverings as various federal agencies report their relevant equities, and media coverage of these.
More interesting (to nerds, accountants, or political prognosticators who wouldn't trust a media summary) is the White House's own summary here.
The Discretionary Budget request is basically what most people think of as 'the budget,' but is really 'everything that is not an entitlement.' This is the part of the budget where Congress and Presidents really haggle over year-by-year. The US President's Request is just that- a request- but generally serves as an initial input for the rest of the Congressional process to work off of.
Which- since this is a year of Republican trifecta- makes the following opening a bit... spicey. (For a bureaucratic proposal.)
(As a disclaimer- the following should be read as raising implications, not advocacy or predictions of success. I am not making any moral argument on the proposal at this time. Feel free to hate or like the budget proposal as you will.)
The President’s topline discretionary Budget holds the line on total spending while providing unprecedented increases for defense and border security. Defense spending increases by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete their mission. These increases would be made possible through budget reconciliation, which would allow them to be enacted with simple majorities in the Congress, and not be held hostage by Democrats for wasteful nondefense spending increases as was the case in President Trump’s first term.
**Nondefense spending is reduced by $163 billion or 22.6 percent while still providing support for our Nation’s veterans, seniors, law enforcement, and other critical priorities for the Federal Government. Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating programs found to be woke and weaponized against ordinary working Americans, wasteful, or best left to the States and localities to provide.
Well, maybe the partisan jabs are spicier to most. But the point of planning to pass through reconciliation is an opening salvo of an intent / threat to pass without seeking Democratic buy-in. That doesn't mean there will be no negotiations or concessions for votes, but it is signaling an interest/willingness to brute force through the legislature as needed.
This is very much maximizing the value of a trifecta while you have it. It can also galvanize an opposition party to call 'bet,' and try to target / pressure vulnerable Republicans to flip their vote, and thus make it fail. In which case, either the Republicans compromise, or a government shutdown results. This is what some Democrats wanted Chuck Schumer to do earlier this year, rather than pass the Republican budget through the Senate.
Keep a pin on that shutdown. We'll come back to it later.
The budget says it prioritizes three main things. This is the surface-level 'what they want you to know'-level priorities, not what specific elements are more important than others. Just in general terms, they are-
Rebuild our Nation’s Military. The Budget request for the Department of Defense builds on the President’s promise to achieve peace through strength by providing the resources to rebuild our military, re-establish deterrence, and revive the warrior ethos of our Armed Forces. In combination with $113 billion in mandatory funding, the Budget increases Defense spending by 13 percent, and prioritizes investments to: strengthen the safety, security, and sovereignty of the homeland; deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific; and revitalize America’s defense industrial base.
No real surprise. Generally ambiguous / non-specific.
Secure the Border. Amounts for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the 2026 Budget complement amounts that the Administration has requested as part of the reconciliation bill currently under consideration in Congress. The resources provided would empower the DHS to implement the President’s mass removal campaign and secure the border.
This is notable not because it's a surprise, but because budget laws are a key way for the US government to be granted authorities to do things. Part of the current judicial holdups on the Trump judicial programs have centered on 'you can't use that law in this way' objections. While the administration is likely going to argue in court that they do and see what it can still do, expect the cases they lose to lead to language in these bills giving a more modern congressional authorization.
Achieve American Energy Dominance. The Budget supports the President’s commitment to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources. The Budget cancels over $15 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) Green New Scam funds provided to the Department of Energy for unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies that burden ratepayers and consumers. The Budget reorients Department of Energy funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power. The Budget also cancels an additional $5.7 billion in IIJA funding provided to the Department of Transportation for failed and unnecessary electric vehicle charger grant programs.
Hostility to renewable energy spending is not a surprise. The emphasis on baseload power is consistent with Trump's arguments of reshoring domestic manufacturing, as baseload power dynamics are a major consideration for energy-intensive heavy industry.
The next three pages are 1-paragraph summaries of specific lines of effort. Call these sub-priorities, and expect these to be the Trump-aligned media's preferred framings for various efforts.
Due to the formatting dynamics, I can't copy-paste the whole thing. Instead, I will bring the main section headers, and what I think are the most interesting implications to the motte cultural war thread audience.
Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). The discretionary Budget request builds on the President’s MAHA Commission. The Budget provides resources to the Department of Health and Human Services that would allow the Secretary to tackle issues related to nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.
Generally unobjectionable. However, don't be surprised if progressive medical policies (particularly for transgender health) get involved in the medications and treatments section.
Support Our Veterans.
Includes a proposal to allow veterans to see local community providers, rather than go to specific Veteran Affairs installations.
This proposal will allow Trump to cut Veterans Affair federal employees due to offsetting care to the private sector. This is part of a reoccuring theme of 'things that would allow the Federal government to reduce workforce.' Expect it to be raised as cutting care for veterans, but also to be a popular-ish proposal with veteran groups depending on how it's done.
Preserve Social Security. The Budget also includes investments in program integrity, to reduce fraud and abuse in Social Security programs, and in investments in artificial intelligence to increase employee productivity and automate routine workloads.
The social security fraud angle will almost certainly tie into authorizing DOGE to access to social security data, which was subject to an injunction and was part of the mid-April media cycles. The AI-to-automate is the first mention of AI use, and is an enabler of a key theme of reducing the required government workforce.
Streamline K-12 Education Funding and Promote Parental Choice. To limit the Federal role in education, and provide States with more flexibility, the Budget creates a new K-12 Simplified Funding Program that consolidates 18 competitive and formula grant programs into a new formula grant, and a Special Education Simplified Funding Program that consolidates seven IDEA programs into a single grant. The Budget also invests $500 million, a $60 million increase, to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, which have a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.
Grant program conditions are occasionally subject to criticism for which criteria they favor. Consolidating them not only provides a more uniform dynamic, but- again- reduces workforce requirements to manage.
A more than 10% increase in charter fund support, which is completely compatible with undercutting public employee teacher unions, which are a significant Democratic party interest group in various states.
Make America Skilled Again (MASA). The Budget proposes to give States and localities the flexibility to spend Federal workforce dollars to best support their workers and economies, instead of funneling taxpayer dollars to progressive non-profits finding work for illegal immigrants or focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Under this proposal, States would now have more control and flexibility to coordinate with employers and would have to spend at least 10 percent of their MASA grant on apprenticeship, a proven model that trains workers while they earn a paycheck and offers a valuable alternative to college.
Ignoring the (expected) DEI jab / defunding, this both (a) uses the grant model to decrease federal administrator roles in determining how grants are used, as opposed to checking for violations in state use, and (b) increases a local-state emphasis on manufacturing / 'apprenticeship' jobs. This later is consistent with the broader re-shore industry premise of other policies.
Support Space Flight. 7 billion for lunar exploration, 1 billion for Mars-focused efforts, and a reductions in 'lower priority' research for a 'leaner' workforce.
Expect 'lower priority' to go after environment-science related areas.
Realign Foreign Aid. The Budget reorganizes the U.S. Agency for International Development into the Department of State to meet current needs and eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practice.
Codifying what was already de facto being done under the Rubio dual-hat arrangement at the beginning of the administration. The probable expectation / intention of codifying this into law should update people's understandings of why the USAID shutdown went about the way it did, and view it as part of an opening move in the months that followed.
End Weaponization and Reduce Violent Crime. The Budget ends the previous administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), and instead prioritizes the Department’s key functions: combatting lawlessness; restoring order to America’s communities; fighting crime; and supporting America’s men and women in Blue. To that end, the Budget proposes to eliminate nearly 40 DOJ grant programs that are duplicative, not aligned with the President’s priorities, fail to reduce violent crime, or are weaponized against the American people.
Expect this to be the shoe to drop on parts of the FBI that Trump has a suspicion / skepticism / has felt internally opposed by, but which have been protected by their establishing laws that limit USAID-style Executive-only actions against them.
Maintain Support for Tribal Nations. The Budget preserves Federal funding for the Indian Health Service and supports core programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, sustaining the Federal Government’s support for core programs that benefit tribal communities. At the same time, it streamlines other programs for tribal communities, to reduce inefficiencies and eliminate funding for programs and activities found to be ineffective
This matches a general theme of 'healthcare to Americans is not the target; administrating programs that disperse it and other types of programs are.'
Address Drug Abuse and Mental Health. This includes redirecting DEA’s foreign spending to regions with criminal organizations that traffic significant quantities of deadly drugs into the United States—Mexico, Central America, South America, and China. The Budget also proposes to refocus activities that were formerly part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, by eliminating funding for programs that duplicate block grant funding, or are too small to have a national impact.
This is actually the first budget-level section focused on foreign countries, and it's focused on the Western Hemisphere. This is particularly notable due to Trump designated the drug cartels as terrorist organizations. This- and the earlier DHS- indicate an expected / intended increase in emphasis in Latin America efforts, which... could be not well received, depending on how Trump goes about it. (Or- alternatively- foreign agreement in cooperating is a basis of ongoing tariff negotiations.)
The second sentence of programs that duplicate block grant is notable as part of the block grant trend. For those unfamiliar, in the US block grants refer to money given to states and localities directly to use for specific programs, as opposed to programs managed by the government. It's basically delegating to state levels, as opposed to a federal bureaucracy. Advocates typically argue on grounds of efficiency / local expertise. Opponents of block grants have claimed they are a back-door to reducing programs, and/or make it harder to monitor.
Support Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Research. The Budget maintains funding for research in artificial intelligence and quantum information science at key agencies, to ensure the United States remains on the cutting edge of these critical technologies’ development and responsible use.
Quoted in full for the interested. There are no cuts advocated here, but also no increases claimed.
Improve Wildland Firefighting. Federal wildfire risk mitigation and suppression responsibilities currently are split across five agencies in two departments. The Budget reforms Federal wildland fire management to create operational efficiencies by consolidating and unifying Federal wildland fire responsibilities into a new Federal Wildland Fire Service at the Department of the Interior. This new service would streamline Federal wildfire suppression response, risk mitigation efforts, and coordination with non-Federal partners to combat the wildfire crisis.
Further reorganization / consolidation / implicit reduction in overall scope.
And that's it! At least on the White House summary.
Something not mentioned- but which may be hidden in the non-public spending- was anything about relocating federal agency headquarters out of DC. I made a point last month about how relocating agencies out of DC could be expected to have long-term effects on their political alignment with hyper-blue DC norms. I would be surprised if that doesn't come up.
But- to bring back to an earlier point- how likely is this to pass?
A lot of this is naked culture war politics. That's not surprising, even if the previous administration used different political interest language in its proposals and such. There are also some pretty clear institutional interests. In so much that any agency is seen as 'too friendly' or 'too hostile,' reorganizations, reductions, and so on, any reduction is a risk in future allies and influence. Or a mitigation, depending on your perspective.
So, that's going to be a major question of the next few months. Coincidentally, right as Trump reduces his interest in Ukraine after the mineral deal, freeing up decisionmaker space for ongoing tariff negotiations and then the later budget battle culminations.
What will happen? Who will win? Will the Democrats be able to peal off enough Republicans and deny the budget the votes it needs to pass? Will the Democrats compromise and support a bill that guts treasured programs and threatens some interest groups? Will the Democrats be able to save their institutional allies?
Or will the Republicans lose, and be forced to take blame with a government shutdown?
In a respect, that last option may not matter. When it comes to saving certain agencies, this budget may be heading for a 'Heads I win, Tails you lose' dynamic.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ignited a party rebellion by averting a government shutdown earlier this year. He has been accused of being too weak on Trump, of not picking the fight the democratic base wanted. I can fully see one occurring again, but worse, with a few more months of political pressure.
As bad as passing the CR is, as I said, allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.
First, a shutdown would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.
Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel “non-essential,” furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.
The decision on what is essential would be solely left to the executive branch, with nobody left at agencies to check them.
In short, a shutdown would give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, and Russell Vought the keys to the city, state and country.
...
Many federal employees and government experts are rightly worried that a temporary shutdown could lead to permanent cuts.
Second, if we enter a shutdown, Congressional Republicans would weaponize their majorities to cherry-pick which parts of the government to reopen.
In a protracted shutdown, House and Senate Republicans would pursue a strategy of bringing bills to the floor to reopen only their favorite departments and agencies, while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.
...
Extremely troubling, I believe, is that a shutdown could stall federal court cases – one of the best redoubts against Trump’s lawlessness. It could furlough critical staff, denying victims and defendants alike their day in court, dragging out appeals, and clogging the justice system for months or even years.
I will note in this last section that judges legally cannot require the Federal government to spend money on programs Congress has not authorized money for in a budget or continuing resolution.
So each of those judicial-injunction fights? The ones stopping Trump from closing a program now / demanding employees be re-hired / spend money on the already-passed budgets? Money that would be legally unavailable for the government to spend without a FY26 budget?
...yeah... you can't injunction a shutdown of government agencies during a government shutdown...
A lot of the ongoing DOGE fights aren't necessarily about shutting programs literally right now or not at all. In some respects, they should be thought of as preparatory actions. Testing limits, generating early wins for the base and provoking some doomed fights from the opposition, seeing what polls better or worse with the electorate they care more about. Setting conditions for the FY26 budget that Trump's team was planning for.
And baiting out the nation-wide injunctions, so that the ongoing Supreme Court case about them can limit a current go-to policy obstacle. Which- whatever the outcome- will clarify the legal environment, and Trump's legal strategies, for the next few years.
So... who wants to register predictions on a US government shutdown later this year?
Following from @Quantumfreakonomic's post yesterday on the judge who was arrested for trying to sneak an illegal migrant out of a courthouse to avoid ICE, that media storm may be prompting a counterstory on the latest Trump immigration outrage to be outraged about.
Reuters: Two-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported 'with no meaningful process'
New York Times: 2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects
CBS News: Judge demands answers on whether 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras
Washington Post: Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana
Rolling Stone: Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer
CNN: Federal judge says 2-year-old US citizen was deported with mother to Honduras
Yes, the new scandal for the new week, just in time to replace coverage of the somewhat embarrassing judge from last week, now presents a heroic judge objecting to the deportation of US children. While multiple cases are there, the focus of the current not-at-all coordinate push focuses on the 2-year old from Louisana.
Admittedly, the CNN article did make the mistake of letting the headline reveal some of the possible nuance as to 'why'. Being the only headline to mention 'mother' was what started this little media dive.
The key sequence of events from the CBS article include-
According to a petition filed Thursday by Trish Mack, a friend of child's mother, the girl, her 11-year-old sister and mother were taken into custody Tuesday morning while attending a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at an ICE office in New Orleans. The mother had attended meetings like this regularly for four years, often bringing her daughters with her. They were taken to the meeting by the girl's father, the petition reads.
After being detained, the mother and her two daughters were transported to an ICE field office in New Orleans, court documents state. When the father arrived at that office, ICE officers gave him papers stating that the mother "was under their custody," documents read, and that she "would call him soon."
That day, an attorney for the family contacted ICE and informed authorities that the girl was a U.S. citizen, the petition said, and also emailed a copy of the girl's U.S. birth certificate to ICE.
But that night, an ICE agent called the father and informed him that "they were going to deport his partner and daughters," documents read.
On Wednesday, an ICE agent spoke with the family's attorney, and "refused to honor a request to release" the girl "to her custodian, stating that it was not needed because" she "was already with her mother," court documents read.
Some of the potentially relevant context, not all of which was in the CBS article, and which different organizations provide different framings for.
On some differences in filings and timings-
CBS
When Doughty, appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term, sought Friday afternoon to arrange a phone call with the mother of the girl, Justice Department lawyers informed him that a call with the child's mother "would not be possible because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras." The girl is identified in court documents as VML.
CNN
Lawyers for the family filed an emergency petition Thursday, asking the court to order the child’s “immediate release” by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying they “lack any statutory or constitutional authority” to detain her as a US citizen, according to the petition.
Washington Post
Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported, identified as V.M.L. in court documents, filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana on Thursday seeking her release. The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened.
CBS
In an effort to halt the deportation of the two daughters, the father on Tuesday filed for a temporary transfer of legal custody, which under Louisiana law would give his sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen who resides in Baton Rouge, custody of both.
CNN and the Washington Post did not raise the legal custody issue raised on Tuesday, which frames later decisions. The Post in particular removes the child from the context of the mother in the plane to Honduras, treating the 2-year-old citizen as the only relevant individual on the plane as opposed to the mother and older sibling.
CBS did raise the custody case, but does not raise the Thursday petition for immediate release that could be understood in the custody decision.
Only CBS raises that the court session sought Thursday afternoon occurs on Friday afternoon. The Washington Post emphasizes the time of the departure flight as before court could open, insinuating without explicitly claiming a motive for the timing of the flight. No context is provided by anyone on what time the flight actually was, what time the court was, or the other normal times of possible flights to Honduras from the local airport are.
Additionally, no media actually characterizes the relationships between mother, father, and sister-in-law. There's no claim that the father and mother are married. Therefore, there is only an insinuation that the 'sister-in-law' is meaningfully related to the mother in a sense that would normally sway custody fights.
On the basis of the child's removal, for sources that did so-
CBS
The immigration status of the girl's father, mother and sister was unclear. The girl was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in January 2023, according to the filing.
"The parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras. It is common that parents want to be removed with their children," Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to CBS News Saturday.
Washington Post
The government is not disputing the immigration status of any of the three children. Instead, officials contend that the undocumented mothers opted to take their citizen children with them back to Honduras. In their court filing, Justice Department lawyers attached a note they say was written by V.M.L.’s mother saying that she was taking the child with her to Honduras.
CNN
The federal government said in court documents the mother wrote in a letter she “will bring my daughter … with me to Honduras.”
“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with someone the parent designates. In this case, the parent stated they wanted to be removed with the children,” the official said.
“V.M.L. (the child) is not at substantial risk of irreparable harm if kept with her lawful custodian mother,” the government said.
Different sources provide different strengths of agency to the mother. CBS only attribute a mother motive via government statement after the fact, and makes no claim of the mother herself expressing an interest. CNN reports that the government claims the mother wrote a note, but does not mention the note itself was included in court submissions. Washington Post notes that there was an actual note attached, but disassociates veracity via 'they say' to open door for doubt.
Only CNN directly addresses a claimed government policy of asking the migrant parent their preference.
On the status of the father-
Washington Post
Justice Department lawyers argued that “the man claiming to be V.M.L.'s father” had failed to prove his identity to the government despite requests that he present himself to ICE agents, adding that he had also “demonstrated considerable hesitation” regarding the inquiries into his immigration status. The man’s lawyers included V.M.L.’s birth certificate in their fillings, which shows she was born in Baton Rouge and lists the names of both her mother and father.
CNN
The father then moved to give provisional custody of his two daughters to his sister-in-law, a US citizen who lives in Baton Rouge, and the mandate was notarized in Louisiana, the documents say.
The petition alleges ICE refused to honor the father’s request to release V.M.L. to the sister-in-law, stating “it was not needed” because the child was already with her mother, and informed the father he would be taken into custody if he tried to pick her up.
The government said the “man claiming to be V.M.L.’s father” has not presented or identified himself to ICE despite requests to do so, the court documents say.
CBS News
The immigration status of the girl's father, mother and sister was unclear.
In an effort to halt the deportation of the two daughters, the father on Tuesday filed for a temporary transfer of legal custody, which under Louisiana law would give his sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen who resides in Baton Rouge, custody of both.
The ICE agent further said that the "father could try to pick her up, but that he would also be taken into custody."
The Washington Post makes no reference to the legal custody attempt by the father, and thus why ICE might request he present himself to them regardless of immigration status. CNN and CBS do acknowledge the custody shift to the sister-in-law, but do not elaborate why the father could not request custody for himself. CBS alludes that the father's status is 'unclear,' while CNN establishes a threat (custody) but not basis for the threat (possible immigrant status himself).
No media covers the implication of an unverified man requesting custody of a child be revoked from the undisputed mother to another woman of unclear relation.
On the Judge's Comments-
CBS
A federal judge says a 2-year-old Louisiana girl and U.S. citizen may have been deported to Honduras this week with her mother and 11-year-old sister without due process, according to court documents obtained by CBS News. In an order Friday, Judge Terry Doughty, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, wrote there was a "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."
Washington Post
Doughty set a May 16 court hearing to investigate his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order did not call for the girl’s return or recommend any recourse for the family.
CNN
“In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process,” Judge Doughty said in the order, a hearing is scheduled on May 16 in Monroe, Louisiana.
The judge added, “It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen,” citing a 2012 deportation case.
The federal government, Doughty said, “contends this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her … But the court doesn’t know that.”
Only CNN quotes the opening section of the Judge's sentence and interest. Both CBS and the Washington Post begins their quote after removing the opening clause, creating a stronger statement.
Trump First Term Child Separation Scandal
Human Rights Watch: Trump’s Cruel Separation Policy Has Not Ended
...I kid, that one is from 2018.
No media references, raises, or otherwise brings attention to the criticisms to the first term policy of detaining or deporting adult illegal migrants without their children.
In summary, if it this starts permutating on the interwebs next week-
The two-year-old american citizen case involves
A larger family(?) of non-citizens migrants with a singular birthright-citizenship daughter
- The non-citizen attributed include the mother who was deported, an 11-year-old-daughter also deported but not claimed to be a US citizen, and the father of unclear-nationality
- The family was allowed to remain under Biden-era Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), which allows individuals to remain in their communities while undergoing immigration proceedings
- ISAP is for illegal migrants, not legal migrant proceedings, as the Biden administration was practicing a remote-application program for processing immigration proceedings pre-arrival, and violating that was a basis of deportation
- There is no allegation that ISAP concluded with a permanent legal status for the family
The American citizen is/was an archetypical 'anchor baby' context without being called such
- Born in Baton Rouge, LA in January 2023
- Which means conception mid-2022, after Biden-era migration policies had become apparent / gained reputation
- The mother either migrated while pregnant, or conceived after arrival.
- The primary legal concern focus raised around this deportation case center around the child's due process rights, not the mother's or sister's
- Unclear legal / policy / political relevance of the sister-in-law to the migrant decisions
More broadly, the headline/surface narratives conflate child deportation with child-custody considerations
- Narratives characterize deportation of the 2-year old child, as opposed to children accompanying deported parents Minimal engagement of process / standards for parents keeping young children with them during processing
- Articles generally avoid acknowledging government policy of offering parents a chance; not mentioned, as opposed to claims it was violated
- General avoidance of parental custody rights and legal expectations of deporting non-citizen adults with citizen minor. For example
-
- If a mother can choose to take an American citizen child with them
-
- If a non-citizen father should be deferred to when requesting custody of children to be taken from the mother to someone else
-
- If the custody dispute between non-citizens must be adjudicated before deportation of the primary parent with their child
Finally- Is there basis for legitimate concern in this scandal?
Yes.
If you thought the lead-up was a the media is totally lying about everything trope, that was deliberate. It was to make a point about why I expect this scandal to hook some and be dismissed by others.
For people who are hawkish on illegal immigration, this case is not your friend. There is a lot of red meat here that could be uncovered- potentially unmarried family unit, a concerned father of uncertain status who in the first minute of establishing contact tries to convey a litigation strategy, child-custody defaults being reversed- but there is a hook that can work against you. And that hook is the disruption of what most people would consider a due process right, even if deportation legalism is different from a criminal court process.
For people upset about ICE and due process, this coverage is also not your friend. The framings- and the not-very-deep undercurrents that go against the framing- will give a basis to dismiss concern as motivated. The children-in-cage's and child-separation critiques are not going to be forgotten. The fact that not separating children from their deported parents is now a basis of criticism is going to undercut criticims of both. The media's rush to present a concerned father is going to run into discrediting disappointing revelations.
But the propaganda doesn't mean there is only propaganda. Even if it's not what the coverage generators wants you to be concerned about, because- again- you need to piece together relevant events not tied together in any single framing.
CBS
When Doughty, appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term, sought Friday afternoon to arrange a phone call with the mother of the girl, Justice Department lawyers informed him that a call with the child's mother "would not be possible because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras." The girl is identified in court documents as VML.
Why was Doughty asking for a phone call with the mother?
Washington Post
That [Tuesday] night, the girl’s father was allowed to speak with her mother for only a minute before an ICE agent ended the call, lawyers contend. Lawyers say the man did not get the chance to speak to his partner or child again until after they were released in Honduras.
Why did the Tuesday night phone call with the mother (allegedly) get stopped by ICE after only a minute?
CNN
Before the father could finish providing the mother with contact information for their attorneys, he heard the ICE officer “take the phone from her and hang up the call,” according to the petition.
This is a claim. It is a claim made by someone with an interest in claiming it regardless of whether it is true or not. It is also a valid basis for concern, independent of deportation of the mother or custody decisions of her child.
If true, this would indicate that communication between the woman and potential legal representation was deliberately disrupted. How long it was disrupted is a relevant interest, particularly if other legal advice might have changed her mind of letting her newborn stay with someone else.
This brings relevant questions that may or may not have been precluded.
- Was the sister-in-law a valid close relation of the mother under existing custody precedent? (It is not claimed. Only that the father requested.)
- Was the mother interested / aware of the attempt at custody revocation at the father's request? (It is not claimed. Only that the mother signed an intent to keep her children.)
- Were the father's lawyers denied access to contact the mother? (It is not claimed. Only that the father did not speak with her until post-deportation.)
- Was the mother denied access to any lawyers she was entitled to? (It is not claimed. Only that the lawyers are characterized as the father's or the family's, not if they contacted her.)
- Was the mother, as opposed to the US citizen child, denied due process deportable aliens are entitled to? (It is not claimed. Only that a specific phone call was ended.)
Is there any legal barrier preventing the 2-year-old US citizen from returning to the US, beyond 'typical' international legal custody issues?
It is not claimed. But then, no major media coverage has expressed interest in that paradigm either.
Frustration.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
Do American on The Motte feel that the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances?
What old alliance are you thinking of?
Define the alliance. What sort is it? What does it entail, who is providing what, and when was this understanding established?
For example: if I was to characterize the transatlantic alliance from 1975, it would be something along the lines of 'the Americans bribed the Europeans to be the front line fodder in a war with the Soviet Union.' Yes, it was in the Americans own interest to fight with the Europeans to prevent Soviet domination of Eurasia, but the Americans were paying for strategic deference (such as via the Marshal Plan and establishing favorable trade flows / market access for the Europeans), and the Europeans were the ones who would be the front line shield. In the crudest oversimplification, it was a mercenary relationship, where the Europeans were the mercenaries.
Around the late 90's/00's, however, my perception is that the desires of at least half of the alliance shifted. The Europeans did not want to defer to American strategy, but did want preferential market access. Which is why the EU formed with the common market barrier with often explicit purpose of negotiating a better deal vis-a-vis the Americans, and they had the strategic break over Iraq when the French and Germans tried to muster a pan-European boycott of strategic cooperation with the US. (This is not a criticism.) Come the 2010s, and the Germans were outright laughing at American warnings of vulnerabilities vis-a-vis Russia, and some of that was after Crimea.
Which is fine enough. Again, observational, not a criticism. But if the alliance has shifted from a mercenary dynamic, what sort of alliance is supposedly being broken?
Come the 2020s, if I were to characterize the sort of alliance the European establishment media and media spheres signals they want, it would be something along the lines of 'the Americans are to be the front line fodder in a war with the Russians... but also pay us for non-military cooperation on China.' Hence why when the US finally adopts a European-style domestic industrial policy as part of the anti-China strategy, there is significant lobbying for exceptions to let American subsidies to go to European factories importing Chinese material. And why the scandal of the hour is the US is failing NATO by... not sending yet more material support to a non-NATO country. When over the last few years, in the face of the biggest military crisis on the continent, major European power centers wanted to approach critical logistic shortfalls in things like Artillery shell production by... limiting contracts with these funds to only European manufacturers, and cutting off American producers who had already started expanding production at significant expense on the expectation of there being demand for such products.
Like, I'm not against supporting Ukraine. Even saying that is an understatement. I could even make a number of arguments why carve outs for the Europeans in industrial strategy is a good thing. But if you approach a major logistical bottle neck as the basis for a jobs program, it might just give a signal that the security issue is not actually the biggest concern, and that protecting your jobs program from competition from your security partner is.
Which, again, is fine. I have been an outspoken proponent that other countries have agency, and such decisions should be respected. If the Europeans, as I have been led to believe by the last few weeks of European media, truly believe that the US military is a security threat to them, I would not bat an eye if they demanded the US military leave germany, and I would expect the Americans to do so at all due (albeit deliberate) speed.
But that certainly isn't the same sort of alliance that was formed with NATO and the Marshal Plan and the Cold War.
As for what's going on in the present-
But the current situation re Ukraine is also sending confusing signals, as it had previously seemed as though the US wanted Europe to step up and be part of a solution for Ukraine, whereas currently it seems they actively want to stop Europe from having a role in peace talks. The motive for this appears to be stopping Europe from asking terms of Russia that would delay a solution the US and Russia find jointly satisfactory, though perhaps there is more going on beneath the surface.
Part of this is transactionalism, and part of this is that Trump has a memory and many of the major Europeans not-so-subtly loathed him and celebrated the partisan efforts of the previous administration to put him away.
The later is just choosing the wrong side of the American electoral culture war, which has been a European choice / mistake since the Obama years. When Trump came into office, the European center-establishment eagerly accepted the premise of the Russiagate conspiracy due to its parallels with European actors, generally accepted / echoed American-left framings in a symbiotic cycle, and greatly rejoiced when Trump left. When you choose political favorites, and join in to various degrees on the political warfare, you pay political costs when their enemies come out on top. By contrast, the Japanese and Koreans never joined in, and broadly got by without issue. It certainly also helps that Japan has always spent significantly on its navy, and the Koreans on their army, so were forced to be fought alongside of instead of in place of.
The point on transactionalism is more important, and goes up to what was stated before- the nature of the 'old' alliance has been changing, and with it the underpinning logic. The alliance going forward will be as strong as the clear and convincing benefit to the American electorate, as judged by the American electorate.
Is Trump vain / greedy / [insert pejorative here]? Sure, why not. But he is also underscoring the benefits, or lack of benefits, by demanding things that would be beneficial to receive, while allowing the reaction to serve as a contrast. The contrast is the point, because the contrast is what will legitimize future decisions under the transactionalist paradigm.
Does Trump really expect Ukraine to sign over 50% of the resources (however you want to define that)? Almost certainly not. Does it make a big flashy point that the expenditure of aid does not directly increase future American wealth? Almost certainly so. Cost of support versus benefit from continuing.
Similarly with the Greenland saga. Does Trump actually in his heart of hearts believe Denmark will sell Greenland? Who knows, though obviously any businessman would insist he does. Do various European establishment media characterizations of the US as threatening invasion, and calls for sending european troops to the island make a big contrast with the lack of troops being advocated for Ukraine for the last few years? Probably. And it would also make it easier to draw down forces in Europe, if there are multiple major European media outlets and officials who can be caught on camera saying they think the American military is a threat.
Which, in turn, can be leveraged when engaging in the next round of, say, US-German base agreements and cost-coverage of American presence. Angela Merkel allegedly once protested to Trump that the US couldn't withdraw from German bases, because of the impact it would have on those German localities dependent on American military and soldier spending. This is not the right line of argument to take with Trump, who generally views such expenditures as a financial net cost (which is generally true) not worth the cost (which is debatable, but he's the one who has to be convinced).
Trump's approach to the European alliance this time around is fundamentally not going to be about equitable burden sharing. The Europeans laughed at him about that last time around. It is likely to be a very clear-cut transactional 'what about this is self-evidently advantageous to an American skeptic,' so that the American leaders gain rather than spend political capital working with Europe.
Helping Ukraine, while popular in many corners, was not exactly an election-winner. Giving military equipment away or at massive discounts while major European powers and media spheres moot the merits of blocking the US from the European arms market is certainly not an election winner in any way.
The flip side of that transactionalism, however, is that partnership will be available when there is clear, unambiguous benefit to the US for doing so, something that could be shown to the American electorate.
And since the Europeans generally lack military capabilities that would allow the US to achieve things it otherwise wouldn't, that's going to mean non-military trades for the American to point to.
Or- to return to the crudest metaphor of alliance logic-
Cold War NATO was an alliance in which the Europeans were the mercenaries being paid for on retainer by the Americans.
Cold War NATO died brain-death when the Europeans didn't want to be mercenaries, but still wanted the Americans to pay them.
Trump-Europe can be an alliance in which the Americans are the mercenaries paid for by the EUropeans... but mercenaries still have to be paid.
That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that.
You just spent weeks digging through old grievances dating back a decade, and then made it a top-level post about it. On multiple websites, even.
Yes, I realize that you feel yours are important and valid and other peoples are beneath acknowledgement, but this is part of why you are getting pushback from people with longer memories of your past conduct.
Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.
In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.
I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.
How can it be a glorious diaspora if you keep coming back after denouncing it?
This isn't your first flounce. You came back after establishing the Schism, you came back after Liberals of TikTok, you came back after the site switch, and probably several more breaks I'm not recalling offhand. Between the recruitment attempts and the self-promotion efforts but also just to discuss emerging and contemporary news, you never stay away for terribly long. In much the same one that one is not stuck in traffic, but a part of the traffic, you are (still) a Mottizan.
You may leave for awhile, and all the longer for it being called out on it, but you'll return as you have multiple times before.
All the best.
Until you come back again, and not just for the last words tonight or tomorrow.
Counter-point- pardons are not a bug, but a feature, of governmental design.
The point of American governmental powers is not as a tool for angelic figures, but as a check against other branches. That it can be used to block investigations / prosecutions of 'legitimate' crimes is a merit, not evidence of failure, because 'I'm just cracking down on corruption' is an archetypical basis for political purges of political opponents. The checks and balances of government are far more concerned about the later- the abuse of judicial processes- than they are the former- the ability of guilty people to get off free.
The Pardon-power is an executive check against both the legislature (which could legislate unreasonable laws that none could fail to break, and then use said breaks arbitrarily to disqualify), but just as importantly the judiciary (whose power revolves around process conclusions). Just from a system design, if you want to remove a check on the executive against other branches, you are implicitly either replacing it with a new- and as to date not norms-established power- against the other branches, or you are refusing to replace it. Either of these are destablizing changes to a system.
In turn, the guardrails against veto abuse aren't just voters (note the lame-duck rush as opposed to the years before Biden lost the election), but inter-party and inter-branch politics. If the President, Congress, and Judiciary are on board with the same abuse, there's no particular limit (or need) for the veto regardless. The challenge comes when the President and Judiciary are at odds, and Congress is the wavering party. If Congress supports the President, the Judiciary is at a loss regardless, and the veto is just a means by which it is done. But if Congress opposes the President, the limitation on the veto is the limitation of the President's relationship with Congress- the president needs Congressional support for other things, and even outgoing presidents have political considerations.
In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions. That mitigation can be a way to limit future politically-motivated prosecutions (Trump against Biden; more historically, the Nixon pardon), and mitigate past politically-motivated prosecutions (Biden against Jan 6 rioters, when the Jan 6 cases are contrasted against BLM / 2016 rioters). That you can view both of these (or neither of these) as 'actual' crimes does not change the politically charged nature of the prosecution (or potential prosecution) as viewed by substantial amounts of the public.
By contrast, limiting the ability of a President to grant clemency doesn't prevent the politically motivated prosecutions in the first place, but would make them harder to undo, which is less preventing future abuses as much as protecting them more if not even a change of governing party could reverse them.
Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To
Consider this your invitation to get a drink, pop your feet up, and think about how the state of the world is conveyed to you rather than what the bad news of the week actually is.
(Is this escapism? Unrepentantly so. Also, a nerd out on the evolution of the media industry over the last few years. What else are you on the Motte for?)
This Monday the 2025 Digital News Report was published. This is a review of global media trends, such as how media consumption, habits, preferences, and audience composition have changed over the last years. It reflects on how various audiences consume and have been shaped by elements of the culture war, such as Musk's management of X, the rise of Tiktok, AI, and so on.
Given how much of the discourse here covers the coverage of these topics, this study seems salient. Especially since it is billed as the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.
This is not an empty media boast. This probably is the most comprehensive, and global-spanning, media industry analysis I've read in some time, and while it's not without its blemishes. It's not without blemishes, but when the executive summary is 25 pages long (admittedly with many graphics), there's a lot to unpack. But since expecting anyone to read a 171 page report is a bit much, why not break it down a bit lot?
This post is going to be taking highlights, key points, and so on from the study executive summary. Much, but not all, will be quoted. I will make comments of my own where I feel most interested, but will try to keep my thoughts distinct from the article. Due to how it's formatted, it does not copy-paste neatly. Forgive the jank that slips through.
///
Who is this by for whom and why should you believe a word of it?
This is Ivy League level academic research made with significant assistance by corporate media clearly hoping for actionable insights at a global level. Given the monetary incentives at stake, this is a case where commercial interests, including those well outside western progressive circles, are a mitigating influence to personal preferences.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a part of Oxford University in England. This is an academic-journalism nexus by, of, and for industry professionals. This level of academia has a lot of cross-pollination with the US, but this isn't 'merely' an advocacy section, but a professional interest institution.
The key sponsors and supporters of this report are identified on page 3 of the PDF. The 'main sponsor' is Google News Initiative, but the 'supported by' includes a whose-who of major western media companies. Not just newspaper companies like Reuters either, but groups like Youtube, BBC, Korea Press Foundation, Ofcom, CodeAfrica, and other media actors. This is Media as a Business, not media as a political faction, and the target audiences are global, not American-European specifically.
This sponsorship is key for understanding the article's focus on consumer demographics, preference changes, and so on. This is a report on 'how people consume digital news' paid by the types of groups that provide digital media. When it addresses topics of 'people are tuning out,' this is not (primarily) in the sense of an ideological 'people are ignoring us,' but in the context of 'consumers are not consuming your product for these reasons.'
This corporate motive is a basis to give credence to the data-driven observations here. This is a product paid for with money to generate more money, and so accuracy is an interest more than ideological performance. When the study talks about media market trends, it's for the sake of people who want a more accurate understanding of the media market.
That said... (Bias Warning)
Yes, there is bias, of a predictable pro-media-establishment sort. Oxford is still a prestige university, and the Reuters Institute being a professional interest institution is still both for, by, and once again for journalists. Unsurprisingly, they have a good impression of themselves, and bad impression of others who doubt their conduct or character. The dislike of Trump is palpable in the way that only 'we will use studiously neutral language except for our word choice framing unfavored actors' can be, and gets a bit more blatant in country-by-country breakdowns deep in.
That said- it's still worth reading. This is what it looks like when people try to mitigate their biases and take an objective look at the situation. Whatever the authors of a specific section may feel people should feel about themselves, they are not adverse to directly recognizing things like low reputational trust.
///
The Methodology
This is a 'good enough to be useful' YouGov online questionnaire between January and February 2025, not a 'gold standard' method. Page 6 has the disclaimers and caveats for how strongly, or not strongly, to take certain elements. Statistics given should be understood to be ballpark estimates.
• Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market. Education quotas were also applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in around a third of our markets including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.
Note that 2024 was a year of many major elections in the US and Europe. As a result, this (should) reflect a fair deal of European political distribution.
• Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.
The survey was not done in English in most markets, however, giving substantial insight potential.
• More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population.
This is the key caveat. This is not a full study of all media consumers, but specifically online media consumers, i.e. the generation of today and the trends to expect to grow tomorrow as old people die and younger people replace them.
• The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.
Don't put too much faith on the exact numbers, but do value the magnitude and general direction.
///
Opening Narrative
This executive summary opens with this narrative, before many sub-sections. This section is quoted in full.
This year’s report comes at a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, not to mention climate breakdown and continuing destructive conflicts around the world. Against that background, evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving, with newspapers flying off shelves, broadcast media and web traffic booming. But as our report shows, the reality is very different. In most countries we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions.
An accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms is further diminishing the influence of ‘institutional journalism’ and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers. Populist politicians around the world are increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse.
These trends are increasingly pronounced in the United States under Donald Trump, as well as parts of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, but are moving more slowly elsewhere, especially where news brands maintain a strong connection with audiences. In countries where press freedom is under threat, alternative ecosystems also offer opportunities, at their best, to bring fresh perspectives and challenge repressive governments. But at the same time these changes may be contributing to rising political polarisation and a coarsening debate online. In this context, our report uncovers a deep divide between the US and Europe, as well as between conservatives and progressives everywhere, over where the limits of free speech should lie – with battle lines drawn over the role of content moderation and fact-checking in social media spaces.
This year’s survey also highlights emerging challenges in the form of AI platforms and chatbots, which we have asked about for the first time. As the largest tech platforms integrate AI summaries and other news-related features, publishers worry that these could further reduce traffic flows to websites and apps. But we also show that in a world increasingly populated by synthetic content and misinformation, all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don’t use them as often as they once did.
With growing numbers of people selectively (and in some cases consistently) avoiding the news, we look into the potential benefits of using new generative AI technologies to personalise content and make it feel more engaging for younger people. Our report, which is supported by qualitative research in three markets (the UK, US, and Norway), also includes a chapter on the changing state of podcasting as the lines blur with video talk shows and explores the prospects for charging for audio content. We also investigate where the value lies in local news and what appetite there might be towards more flexible ways of paying for online content, including ‘news bundles’.
This fourteenth edition of our Digital News Report, which is based on data from six continents and 48 markets, including Serbia for the first time, reminds us that these changes are not always evenly distributed. While there are common challenges around the pace of change and the disruptive role of platforms, other details are playing out differently depending on the size of the market, long-standing habits and culture, and the relationship between media and politics. The overall story is captured in this Executive Summary, followed by Section 2 with chapters containing additional analysis, and then individual country and market pages in Section 3.
///
Key Findings
This section is provided in full. Following sections will be selective extracts.
• Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6pp) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources.
One of the (not explicit) trends in the survey is that alternative-media news consumption increases as the engagement, and trust, in traditional media falls. There is more explicit recognitition of alternative media environments later.
• Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates. One-fifth (22%) of our United States sample says they came across news or commentary from popular podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men. In France, young news creator Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s with content distributed mainly via YouTube and TikTok. **Young influencers also play a significant role in many Asian countries, including Thailand. **
One of the (non-explicit) parallels/trends in this study is that the US media market is diverging in style from Europe, and more towards Asia. This correlates with relative trust in establishment media and political polarization, which is characterized here as having been higher in Asia than in Europe for some time.
• News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.
Remember the selection bias for the yougov poll, but later points indicate that the increase in social media news-sourcing being done by younger demographics, i.e. the long-term future.
• Data show that usage of X for news is stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplift in the United States (+8pp), Australia (+6pp), and Poland (+6pp). Since Elon Musk took over the network in 2023 many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news.
This surprised me a bit since there was a dedicated effort to undercut / subvert X due to Musk. Later data indicates this is more because more right-leaning people joined than left-leaning people left, which isn't surprising, but the failure of the rivals to scale upwards is notable as a long-term influence vector.
• Changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news. Across all markets the proportion consuming social video has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India more people now say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, further encouraging the shift to personality-led news creators.
This is an interesting trend / potential causal loop where low trust in establishment media feeds social media sources, social media sources leading to more trusted personalities, and those personality-led creators being more successful with video, not just audio or text, as the way to establish their personality for the personal relationship trust.
• Our survey also shows the importance of news podcasting in reaching younger, better-educated audiences. The United States has among the highest proportion (15%) accessing one or more podcasts in the last week, with many of these now filmed and distributed via video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. By contrast, many northern European podcast markets remain dominated by public broadcasters or big legacy media companies and have been slower to adopt video versions.
Video-podcasts are rising / eclipsing purely audio-podcasting, which may factor in the personal-relationship-trust alternative model raised above.
• TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network, adding a further 4pp across markets for news and reaching 49% of our online sample in Thailand (+10pp) and 40% in Malaysia (+9pp). But at the same time people in those markets see the network as one of the biggest threats when it comes to false or misleading information, along with Facebook.
Growth of tiktok is not surprising. Credibility might be noteworthy later. One of the information-conflict concerns over Tiktok is that Chinese control over the alorithm shapes what people will see, and thus believe. I've my doubts on the efficacy of that level of influence, and this point on platform-prevalence also corresponding with platform-skepticism suggest that the personality-led model will matter more, which mitigates/reduces the impact of algorithmic bias efforts.
• Overall, over half our sample (58%) say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%), with lowest levels in Western Europe (46%).
Note that Western Europe is a major outlier in the media-skeptic trends, but even here it is a nearly 50-50 concern split. This will be relevant two items down.
• When it comes to underlying sources of false or misleading information, online influencers and personalities are seen as the biggest threat worldwide (47%), along with national politicians (47%). Concern about influencers is highest in African countries such as Nigeria (58%) and Kenya (59%), while politicians are considered the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe.
I'll just note with some humor that the 'influencers' are raised as the biggest threat, despite the same % as 'national politicians.' This is what I meant earlier about elements of bias seeping in.
• Despite this, the public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing more or less content that may be false or harmful, but not illegal. Respondents in the UK and Germany are most likely to say too little is being removed, while those in the United States are split, with those on the right believing far too much is already taken down and those on the left saying the opposite.
When combined with the online truthiness statistic above, this may suggest that efforts on the European level for media fact checking are hinged on (decreasing) higher-trust / older demographic of the political-establishment-center who feels things might yet still be saved.
If those European efforts don't become policy sooner than later, then as political polarization / political-right normalization continues, European markets may hit the same sort of political tipping point where political pluralities view 'confidence-boosting fact checking' as 'politically motivated censorship against them,' facilitating the trust spiral. Thus, a limited political window of opportunity before establishment fatigue leads to the current establishments being able to implement these policies to (hopeful) success.
• We find AI chatbots and interfaces emerging as a source of news as search engines and other platforms integrate real-time news. The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).
There's an unsurprising theme of the younger generation being both the most online, the most attuned to social media, and the most comfortable with AI products.
• With many publishers looking to use AI to better personalise news content, we find mixed views from audiences, some of whom worry about missing out on important stories. At the same time there is some enthusiasm for making the news more accessible or relevant, including summarisation (27%), translating stories into different languages (24%), better story recommendations (21%), and using chatbots to ask questions about news (18%).
• More generally, however, audiences in most countries remain sceptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop. Across countries they expect that AI will make the news cheaper to make (+29 net difference) and more-up-to-date (+16) but less transparent (-8), less accurate (-8), and less trustworthy (-18).
• These data may be of some comfort to news organisations hoping that AI might increase the value of human-generated news. To that end we find that trusted news brands, including public service news brands in many countries, are still the most frequently named place people say they go when they want to check whether something is true or false online, along with official (government) sources. This is true across age groups, though younger people are proportionately more likely than older groups to use social media to check information as well as AI chatbots.
Trusted News Brands is relevant in part because the personality-driven social media network is also a 'trust' relationship. The key point I'd take away / spread is that when people don't feel they can trust traditional media, they are increasingly comfortable / able to defect to the non-traditional media based on trust in a personality, since that's the next-best proximity.
This (loosely) aligns with a regular critique I've made regarding public legitimacy of officials during COVID, when institutional lying lost public trust. Trust / credibility is a resource that's not easily regained.
• One more relatively positive sign is that overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row, even if it is still four points lower overall than it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Remember that this study is by journalist professionals, for journalist professionals. Also remember the warning of bias earlier. 'We should consider it a good sign only 60% do not overall trust in our profession, only one-in-twenty less than during Covid' is damning with faint praise.
• As publishers look to diversify revenue streams, they are continuing to struggle to grow their digital subscription businesses. The proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18% across a basket of 20 richer countries – with the majority still happy with free offerings. Norway (42%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion paying, while a fifth (20%) pay in the United States. By contrast, 7% pay for online news in Greece and Serbia and just 6% in Croatia
This is business-actionable advice. Don't be surprised if some media corporation takes this as evidence that people need to be less happy with free offerings.
///
The preceeding was just the first two pages of the Executive Summary, and this post is over 2/5ths of the word count. The rest of the EXSUM is section-by-section summaries, often elaborating on the key finding paragraphs posted above , so I will quote the major sections, and the most interesting bits by exception.
Please feel free to read the full thing. The executive summary is 25 pages, but it's one-paragraph bits like the above, and not terribly dense.
TRADITIONAL NEWS MEDIA LOSING INFLUENCE – UNITED STATES IN THE SPOTLIGHT
First, the proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time. Eight years ago, the so-called ‘Trump bump’ raised all boats (or temporarily stalled their sinking), including access to news websites, TV, and radio, but this time round only social and video networks (and most likely podcasts too) have grown, supporting a sense that traditional journalism media in the US are being eclipsed by a shift towards online personalities and creators.
These shifts are in large part driven by younger groups – so-called digital and social natives. Over half of under-35s in the United States – 54% of 18–24s and 50% of 25–34s – now say that social media/video networks are their main source (+13pp and +6pp respectively compared with last year). But all age groups are prioritising social media to a greater extent – at the expense of traditional channels such as websites and TV news
In culture-war terms, the red tribe seems to have succeeded in creating its alternative media ecosystem to survive (and thrive) in, and people are increasingly making the jump. X is not-quite-directly credited that elsewhere.
At the same time, we find a continued decline in audiences for traditional TV news, as audiences switch to online streaming for drama, sport, news, and more. TV news reach in France and Japan, for example, is down 4pp and 3pp to 59% and 50% respectively. Linear radio news, which had been relatively stable, is also on a downward trend, with younger audiences often preferring on-demand audio formats such as podcasting.
A non-culture-war explanation for part of the decline, however, is less about tribal politics, and more about technology and business models. As the internet streaming services have undercut cable TV, and internet aggregators undercut papers, traditional media consumption would be declining regardless of politics, just by medium-shift.
Taken together, these trends seem to be encouraging the growth of a personality-driven alternative media sector which often sets out its stall in opposition to traditional news organisations, even if, in practice, many of the leading figures are drawn from these. Prominent YouTubers outside the United States include Julian Reichelt, a former editor of Bild in Germany, and Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor and TV presenter in the UK, but mostly name recognition in Europe for these news creators is much lower than the US.
Already hit the drum that, in the absence of trusted institutions, people will turn to trusted individuals.
A humorous culture swing at our (western) European members here is that the reason they have higher trust in their media institutions because they have more forgettable media influencers to steal them away.
PLATFORM RESETS AND THEIR IMPACT ON NEWS MEDIA
Last year we showed how changes to platform strategies for social media companies such as Meta – including a pulling back from news and investing in video and creator content – were making it even harder for publishers to reach specific audiences. Following Trump’s victory, Meta announced – in another sharp turn of direction – that they will show more political content, but the effects of this, and what it means for publishers in different countries, are yet to be seen.
This year’s data show continuing strengthening of video-based platforms and a further fragmentation of consumption. There are now six networks with weekly news reach of 10% or more compared with just two a decade ago, Facebook and YouTube. Although these networks remain the most important for news amongst the basket of 12 countries we have been tracking since 2014, they are increasingly challenged by Instagram and TikTok with younger demographics. But Messenger (5%), LinkedIn (4%), Telegram (4%,) Snapchat (3%), Reddit (3%), Threads (1%), and Bluesky (1%) are also an important part of the mix for specific audiences or for particular occasions
ELON MUSK’S X AUDIENCE SHIFTS RIGHTWARDS - NO LOSS OF OVERALL REACH
It is striking to see that X has not lost reach for news on aggregate across our 12 countries despite a widespread X-odus by liberals and journalists, including some prominent news organisations, some of whom have relocated to Threads or Bluesky. It may be that X’s reach is less affected than regular engagement, which industry research suggests had been declining before Trump’s return to the White House.
The italicized not was in the original, and is one of the very rare cases it was used. This is about as much of a professional shock as the authors can convey.
This may also shape media company / advertiser perceptions of dealing with X. Part of the X-odus was the (alleged) advertiser boycott. Industry data suggesting the X-audience has not dropped, but in some categories expanded to underserved markets, would support media-actor changes over time.
In the US, at least, the election and its aftermath seems to have re-energised the network. Our poll, which was conducted in the weeks after the inauguration, showed that the use of X for news was 8pp higher than the previous year, reaching almost a quarter (23%) of the adult population.
There is a good graphic in the document (pg 15) which shows X dropping about 5% from 20% to 15% by politically-left respondents after Musk's takeover and rebrand, before jumping to 24% after Trump's election. Over the same general time period, right-respondents when from 9% to 26% to using Twitter for news.
This- combined with the failure of the left-social-sphere like Bluesky- makes X an uncontested (but now bipartisan) public forum.
RISE OF VIDEO NETWORKS INCREASES PRESSURE ON NEWS MEDIA
For several years we have asked where people pay attention when using social networks and have found that mainstream media is at best challenged by – at worst losing out to – these online creators and personalities, even when it comes to news. This trend is evident again this time in data aggregated across all 48 markets. Creators now play a significant role in all the networks apart from Facebook, with traditional media gaining least attention on TikTok. This is not surprising as publishers have struggled to adapt journalistic content in a more informal space as well as worrying about cannibalising website traffic by posting in a network that is not set up for referral traffic.
The exception of TikTok is one of those actionable things for the corporate media funders/audience. This is an incentive to try and make deals with TikTok for greater access, and/or a basis to try and lawfare TikTok out of their domestic media markets.
UNDERLYING PREFERENCES ARE SHIFTING TOO
We’ve already explored the growing importance of online video news and news podcasts at a headline level but it is interesting to consider this in relation to text, which is still the dominant way in which most people access news. To what extent is this changing and with which demographics? Overall, we find that audiences on average across all markets still prefer text (55%), which provides both speed and control from a consumers’ perspective, but around a third (31%) say they prefer to watch the news online and more than one in ten (15%) say they prefer to listen. Country differences are particularly striking, with more people saying they prefer to watch rather than read or listen to the news in India, Mexico, and the Philippines. By contrast the vast majority still prefer to read online news in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
In the correlations with easier, the countries with higher establishment media trust, and the higher willingness to support media truth-corrections, are also the countries where most people still prefer to read rather than hear (or watch) their online news.
This very clear story about preferences is supported by data that show that consumption of online video has also jumped significantly in the last two years, after a period where it had remained relatively static. In the United States, for example, the proportion consuming any news video weekly has grown from just over half (55%) in 2021 to around three-quarters (72%) today. ***The majority of this consumption is accessed via third-party platforms (61%) such as Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok rather than via news websites or apps (29%), adding further evidence to the narrative about the diminishing influence of legacy media. ***
Across all markets the proportion consuming social video news has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. A big part of the change has been the shift of platform strategies which has seen networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X prioritising video more in their algorithms, while Google has added a short video tab to its search results. At the same time, publishers have been producing more videos of various duration and showcasing them more prominently within their websites and apps. The Economist is amongst publishers to have added a vertical video carousel on its home page, while the New York Times has incorporated short social media-inspired videos as a way of bringing out the personality of its reporters.
The change of audience intake is liable to accelerate even in Europe, as media corporations (the study founders) are in a feedback loop of providing more video to meet demands for video, which are accelerating demands for video.
This suggests a... not imminently, but already changing media relationship that will- through the European sharing of US online service providers like Google- bring Europe towards the global norm of personality-media (the winners of video-format), and its associations with lower trust in traditional institutions. Which feeds into the 'window of opportunity' point for any establishment efforts at information-regulation.
THE CHANGING SHAPE AND GROWING INFLUENCE OF NEWS PODCASTING
Our previous research shows that around a third of our global audience accesses some type of podcast monthly, including specialist, sport, entertainment, and a range of lifestyle content, but this year we have changed our approach, focusing more closely just on the news and current affairs category. By adding podcasts to our news consumption question we are able to compare weekly usage for the first time with radio, television, and print news, as well other digital sources.
This new question still shows significant differences across countries, with higher weekly usage of news podcasts in the United States (15%), reflecting strong investment by publishers, independent producers, and advertisers over the last few years. Our data suggest that in the US a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%). Nordic markets such as Denmark (12%), Sweden (11%), and Norway (11%) also have well-developed news podcast markets, but traditional radio remains much more important there (33% average weekly news reach across Northern Europe). In other parts of the world such as Italy (6%), Argentina (4%), and Japan (3%) the podcast market is more nascent.
I wonder how much of the US podcast culture is because of how it aligns with American driving culture, where a podcast is something you can do on the commute to work.
In the United States we find a clear split between analysis-led shows from legacy brands – such as the Daily (New York Times) and Up First (NPR) – and personality-led podcasts that mostly deal in commentary or point of view. Much of the latter overlaps with the growth of the (mostly right-leaning) alternative media ecosystem that we described earlier. In many cases their primary output is not audio but video, with YouTube now the main channel for podcast distribution in the United States. By contrast, Spotify is the most popular podcast platform in the UK and Germany, along with public service media apps such as BBC Sounds and ARD Audiothek.
ONLINE MISINFORMATION AND NEWS LITERACY
This is one of the sections where the professional/personal biases of the presenters can probably be most easily inferred.
In our survey, more than half of our respondents worldwide (58%) agree that they are worried about what is real and fake online when it comes to news – a similar number to last year, but 4pp higher than in 2022. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) where social media are widely used for news across all demographics, as well as the United States (73%), and lowest in Europe (54%). But it is important to put expressed concern in perspective, given that research shows that this is often driven by narratives they disagree with or perceptions of bias, rather than information that is objectively ‘made up’ or false (Nielsen and Graves 2017).
In many countries, leading national politicians are considered by respondents to pose the biggest threat, especially in the United States where Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a strategy of ‘flooding the zone’, often with misleading information or false statements (e.g. that Ukraine started the war with Russia8). He has long used the term ‘fake news’ to vilify media critical of his policies.
Buried further down...
At the same time a significant group (32%) believes that journalists are a big part of the problem. This is especially the case in countries where mainstream media are seen to be unduly influenced by powerful agendas (e.g. Greece and Hungary). In polarised markets such as the United States, those that identify on the right are also much more inclined to see news media as a major threat, with many believing that they deliberately misinform the public and work to a liberal agenda.
I doubt the term 'liberal agenda' was chosen entirely by accident after 'powerful agenda.' (Particularly since 'progressive' barely shows in the study- primarily in the Twitter/X exodus after Musk, and then a few times in the later country studies.)
NEWS LITERACY MAKES LESS DIFFERENCE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK
This one is amusing.
We also asked in this year’s survey about whether people had received any education or training – formal or informal – on how to use news. **Across markets we find that only around a fifth (22%) of our global sample have done so but young people were roughly twice as likely to say they have had news literacy training compared with older groups (36% U35s compared with 17% 35+ globally). A number of Nordic markets, including Finland (34%), had the highest levels of news literacy training. France (11%), Japan (11%), and most of the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had the least.
Remember- the age demographic most likely to eschew traditional media for personality-driven social media is also the demographic more likely too have received literacy training.
So- how do you define success?
We do find that those who have engaged in news literacy training are slightly more trusting of news than those that have not, but this may just be a function of higher levels of education overall. When checking information, these groups tend to use more different approaches on average than those that have had no training – including visiting trusted sources, fact-checking websites, official sources, and politicians, but this exposure to different perspectives may also be making them more sceptical. Those that have had literacy training are more concerned about misinformation – and are more likely to see social and video networks as a major threat (83% compared with 74%).
There is an interesting potential future implication this might have when it comes to corporate lobbying for media regulation / truthiness. Remember that this study was founded by, among others, Google and Youtube. They don't like necessarily that literacy trainign people are concerned a bit more about social and video networks... but young people are also predominantly on those networks, and more importantly, so are the trusted personality-centric mediators.
As a result, increasing concerns about misinformation- both of social media but also traditional media- is more likely to drive audiences to the personalities on the networks that certain corporate strategies can aim to own the profit-streams of.
HOW AUDIENCES VIEW THE ISSUE OF CONTENT MODERATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Across our entire sample, people were almost twice as likely to say that platforms were removing too little rather than too much (32%/18%). This view is particularly strong in the United Kingdom where new rules are starting to be enforced requiring platforms to do more to counter harmful content and make them safer by design, as well as in Germany. But it is a very different story in the United States and Greece where opinion is more split.
This is your reminder that Oxford University, the university overseeing this research, is based in the UK.
These differences around where the limits of free speech should lie are shaped in part by Europe’s history on one side and the US commitment to the First Amendment on the other. But even within the United States we find striking divisions too between those that identify on the left and the right. Almost half of those on the right (48%) think too much is already being removed, whereas a similar proportion of those on the left (44%) think exactly the opposite.
The study does not address why non-westerners stand where they do on censorship responsibilities for the public good.
Across all 48 markets, those on the left also want more content moderation, but those on the right are much more evenly split. Younger people are also in favour of more content moderation in general, but are less likely to say that than older groups, perhaps because they have grown up seeing and managing a wider set of perspectives in social media.
I've mentioned before the prospect of a 'window of opportunity' for European center-left establishments to enforce moderation/censorship policies on media. There are definitely efforts that have been done in the past / are underway in thhe present, but this 'limited opportunity' is the stability/longevity of these dominant coalitions to do so before the ongoing political trends of European establishment delegitimization, the rise of the right, and the demographic turnover change many of the base conditions.
I won't make a position of what will or will not succeed in the next five years, especially with Donald Trump and US (social) media companies as a foil for European nativist efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if moderation propositions run into consistently increased resistance beyond five years from now.
TRUST IN THE NEWS
Despite a clear decline over the last decade, we find that levels of trust in news across markets are currently stable at 40%. Indeed, they have been unchanged for the last three years. But we do find significant differences at a national level. Finland has amongst the highest levels of trust (67%), with Hungary (22%), Greece (22%), and other countries in Eastern Europe bumping along the bottom. Some African countries such as Nigeria (68%), and Kenya (65%) also have high trust scores, but it is important to bear in mind that these are more educated, English-speaking survey samples so are not directly comparable. In these countries, we also find that high trust levels often co-exist with lower levels of press freedom. In Nigeria, for example, RSF (Reporters Without Borders) says governmental interference in the news media is significant.
In examining changes over time, we find that some bigger European countries such as the UK and Germany have seen a significant decline in levels of trust around news (-16pp and -15pp respectively since 2015). In both countries, politics has become more divided, with the media often caught in the crossfire. There was a brief uptick at the beginning of the COVID pandemic as the value of news became heightened for many users, and trust levels have been largely stable since. In Finland and Norway trust levels were already high before the pandemic bump. Here, COVID also seems to have halted any declines, and trust has been maintained or improved since the pandemic.
Remember from earlier, that the 'stable ever since' was '4 points lower than during covid.'
WHAT THE MEDIA COULD DO TO INCREASE TRUST
This is the last section I'll cover due to post size, but I'll quote it in full due to salience.
Whilst recognising that some of the reasons for low trust lie outside the control of many newsrooms (e.g. politicians stoking distrust), we asked survey respondents to give their views on areas the news media itself could improve. The top four themes are consistent across countries and also with previous research.
Impartiality: The most frequently mentioned audience complaint relates to the perception that news media push their own agenda rather than presenting evidence in a balanced way. Many respondents say that journalists need to leave their personal feelings at the door. Avoiding loaded or sensationalist language was a repeated theme.
Accuracy and truth telling: Audiences would like journalists to focus on the facts, avoid speculation and hearsay, and to verify and fact-check stories before publishing. Fact-checking the false claims of others was another suggestion to improve the trust of a particular brand.
Transparency: Respondents would like to see more evidence for claims, including fuller disclosure of sources, and better transparency over funding and conflicts of interest. More prominent corrections when publications get things wrong would be appreciated, along with clearer and more distinct labelling around news and opinion.
Better reporting: Respondents wanted journalists to spend their time investigating powerful people and providing depth rather than chasing algorithms for clicks. Employing more beat reporters who were true specialists in their field was another suggestion for improving trust.
All in all, a good and refreshing bit of frankness of some of the challenges, and things that are in the study's audience (media corporations and journalists) to take away.
Which, of course, is why this section ends with this-
Impartiality, accuracy, transparency, and original reporting are what the public expects, even if many people think that the media continue to fall short. The good news is that these are things many journalists and news media would like to offer people.
I hear a 'but the bad news' coming on...
The challenge is that, especially in polarised societies, there is no clear common agreement on what these terms mean. Improving ‘truth telling’ for one group, for example, could end up alienating another. Adding ‘transparency’ features (see the example below) can end up providing more information for hostile groups to take out of context or weaponise.
Well, they can't annoy the wrong people with truth telling, or let hostile groups use transparency to take things out of context. Better to annoy the right people, and let no one else benefit from the transparency when hostile groups point and accuse.
Le sigh.
This break down ends here. There are ten more pages of the EXSUM, but this is already at 45k words and I doubt I'd get through the rest... and its already 45k words. Plus, what remains transitions more into the clearly business-model-focused stuff, albeit a lot of it dealing with AI.
Instead of carrying on, I'll leave with an endorsement. Despite how I feel about that end section, there is a lot of good data to go over here, and more topics of interest. Chances are if you've read this far, you'd be willing to do so further if any of the topics catch your eye. Do so! Here's the link to the study one last time, and I'll end on the remaining sections.
- NEWS AVOIDANCE AND LOW INTEREST IN THE NEWS
- PERSONALISATION AND THE ROLE OF AI
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE NEWS
- AI-DRIVEN AGGREGATORS INCREASE THEIR REACH
- THE SMARTPHONE DEEPENS ITS HOLD ON OUR TIME
- PAYING FOR ONLINE NEWS AND THE ROLE OF BUNDLING
- LOCAL NEWS UNDER PRESSURE
In the spirit of 'what American culture war development aren't we talking about because of the Trump tariffs,' might I offer...
Trump Goes After the (Largely Democratic) Federal Government Labor Unions
On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled the "EXCLUSIONS FROM FEDERAL LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS PROGRAMS." That is pretty vague, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't recognize what it says inside either.
The (very) short version is that this executive order formally determines various executive agencies "to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." This is the criteria that allows an exception to normal public sector union formation rights and so on. (You don't want the military or CIA to form a union in case it decides to strike, after all.) That might make sense in principle. What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.
Newly added agencies determined to have a 'primary function' as national security work or otherwise, include-
- 1-401. The Department of State.
- 1-403. The Department of the Treasury, except the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
- 1-405. The Department of Justice.
- 1-412. The Environmental Protection Agency.
- 1-415. The National Science Foundation. *etc.
...and you hopefully get the gist. A number of not-usually-considered-national-security departments and agencies have gotten determined to be so. Which, by the law as written, the President can do. Which means also that the public union rules and rights don't apply.
Who does this matter?
Well, for one, public sector unions political action committees (PACs) donate overwhelmingly to the democratic party. $12.5 million vs. $1.6 million in 2023-2024. That's small in absolute political money terms, but shows a significant difference in union institutional support.
But more importantly, about half of all union members in the United States are public sector union members. That's about 7 million public sector members versus 14.3 million total. Further, the ratio of unionization is completely lopsided. Only about 5% (1-in-20) of the public sector employees in the US are unionized. About 33% (1-in-3) of public sector employees are unionized. That's all public-sector unions, mind you, not just the federal government. There are only about 1 million federal public union employees, so 1-in7 of the public sector employees. That's about 14% of public sector employees, or 7% of total union employees. And not all of those will be caught in this recategorization.
Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...
Well, not everyone likes public sector unions. Arch-MAGA personality Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned against public sector unions, on grounds that the government couldn't negotiate with itself. The case against public sector unions has been made for many decade. I'll let people read those takes and have their own opinions. What's more important is that these arguments are not new, but have never made significant traction... until last week.
Reactions have broadly been overwhelmed by the media coverage of last week's tariffs and other Trumpian news cycles. The right-leaning City Journal lauds the effort thought it conceeds some of the classifications are a stretch.. The left-leaning Jacobin calls on unions to make a "militant" response. Somehow, I don't think that will exactly dissuade trump, but we will see.
Will this go to court? Already has. Are plaintiff unions liable to find sympathetic judges in the DC district court, where 11 of the 15 district judges were appointed by Obama or Biden? Probably.
Will they win? I don't know.
But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.
I didn't read the substack in question and don't have a particular opinion on it, but from personal discussions / observations / distant review, the issue is more the aging-out/retering cohort's effect on military families and communities.
While there is a core demographic argument, the demographic is more regional/cultural than demographic per see. South/MidWest/etc. have always been over-represented. The thing the OP's summary paragraph doesn't seem to address is that a lot of enlistment is from military families/communities, rather than blank regional. I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment. There's a family, not just demographic, dynamic in play, which means if the family member advises against rather than for the enlistment... well, 'I'll join the military' isn't exactly social rebellion.
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
This is purely anecdoctal, but the straw that broke the back for some life-longers was how the Biden administration approached the Covid vaccine mandates. The US military, like many in the world, is legally allowed to employ experimental medicines / vaccines on the forces. US troops have been used not only for experimental medical treaments, but also as medical experiment test subjects in the past. When the Biden administration decided to make Covid vaccines mandatory for all forces no matter what, they weren't on particularly legally shakey ground.
What they did run aground on, however, was the disparity between culture war politics and needs-based buy-in. Whatever your competence-expectation for the average junior soldier, US career military professionals are career professionals. They are not only educated, but educated with an eye to practical implications and effects and cross-specialty coordination that many topic-focused specialists are not. And the politically inconvenient facts of COVID- such as that it was not a death plague for the young and the healthy (which most of the armed forces are) or the sort of politically-influenced media pressures were being used in a propagandaist fashion (which the military is above-average aware of as both a target and a perpetrator of) or active suppression of inconvenient medical dissent (which the more conservative-tuned military would be more aware of)- where thus part of the awareness environment even as the administration used brute force command-control precisions to not only demand, but overrule requests for exceptions despite cases of special forces personnel (a highly respect internal community) requesting exceptions for practical concerns, religious personnel requesting exceptions on religious grounds (which have variously been respected in the past), and so on. The evidence that the Covid vaccine wasn't even stopping transitions- and as such not making self-vaccination a breakwater to protect others- undermined a public good argument that the pandemic would end once everyone was vaccinated to stop transmissions. Instead, it was pure formal power demands on institutions of people who are explicitly trained on formal versus informal power dynamics as part of good-leadership training on the assumption that demands from compliance on basis of formal authority is bad leadership. Instead, people that people knew- people with long terms of service, unquestioned loyalty, generally high levels of competence, people who had put up with the worst of the military life and some of the worst strategic decisions of national leadership in a generation- were systematically kicked out for not bending to the political hysteria of the moment. People for whom loyalty was not an ironic thing, for whom a culture of reciprocal loyalty both up and down was both the formal instruction and often found informally, were kicked aside saying 'your services aren't needed anymore.'
What did anyone expect them to tell their families? Or for their friends who kept their heads down but also got out to tell theirs?
American military recruiting was always declining as the 9-11/War on Terror legitimacy faded, but Covid was an inflexion point in at least some US military family circles, where the military went from 'you can be safe and have a successful career as long as you keep your politics to yourself,' to 'you are not safe if you do not defer to the demands for conformity by politically-driven misinformation.' This would be unhelpful regardless, but is especially counter-productive if you (a) are drawing recruitment from the political opposition, and (b) embitter a core part of your informal recruitment advocates who shape the willingness of those most open to joining.
More options
Context Copy link