Category Archives: Trump

a crime against humanity

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Today, the elected leader of the United States said, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Even before we learn what actually happens, it is clear that the threat was a crime against humanity that will permanently mark the history and the reputation of our republic.

These are the two elements of the crime of genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention (ratified by the United States, with the signature of Ronald Reagan):

  1. A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
  2. A physical element, which includes specific acts that include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Just as murder is a crime against a community, which removes an individual from the group, so genocide is a crime against humanity that removes a people or a civilization from the earth. And just as a threat to commit murder is a felony even if the murder is never committed, so a threat to commit genocide is a grave crime against humankind.

This President threatened genocide in order to force Iran to allow oil tankers to continue carrying the substance that is most responsible for global warming, after he had begun the sequence of events that caused the Strait to close in the first place.

As Americans, we might consider Karl Jaspers’ analysis of war guilt, which he presented to an very uncomfortable German audience during the winter of 1944-5:

  1. Criminal guilt is attributable to individuals who have broken specific laws. It merits individual punishment. Donald Trump is guilty in this sense. It is a much harder question whether military personnel bear criminal guilt for following orders, particularly if Trump’s threat turns out to be mainly bluster. It is also doubtful whether Trump will be found guilty in any tribunal. However, Jaspers’ argument implies that Trump should be condemned, not that he will be.
  2. Political guilt belongs to all members of a polity (a democracy or otherwise), because “Everybody is responsible for the way he is governed.” All Americans now bear political guilt for Trump’s actions, even if we have been organizing against him. This does not mean that we should feel personally ashamed or face punishment as individuals. In fact, to cultivate feelings of personal guilt or shame can be self-indulgent. Political guilt does mean that we have a responsibility to act in defense of humanity. We should also expect and be ready to pay a price for the isolation and marginalization of the United States.
  3. Moral guilt: This is what one ought to feel as a result of being connected to an evil, even if one wasn’t personally responsible for what happened. All else being equal, it is bad moral luck to be an American citizen right now, because that makes us morally inferior to citizens of many other countries. Moral guilt requires penance and renewal. We must change the context so that we can be better.
  4. Metaphysical guilt: Jaspers says, “There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.” This kind of guilt extends beyond the borders of the United States. I think one aspect of it is complicity. Billions of people will use (and will have to use) oil that will be cheaper if Trump’s threat works. Another aspect is self-awareness. We now know–if we didn’t know it already–that an educated and affluent population of free human beings can choose a leader who chooses to threaten another civilization with extermination. This is a fact about people. It would be convenient if it were only a fact about Americans, but we have learned that it is not. Our thinking about politics and ethics must be chastened by this reality about ourselves.

See also: Jaspers on collective responsibility and polarization;

the weakness of Trump’s domestic strategy

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Yuval Levin offers an important perspective on the second Trump Administration so far.* I anticipate several reasons that Trump opponents will be skeptical, but I think that Levin’s argument should influence the strategies of the left and the center-left.

Levin’s key points:

  1. “Trump signed fewer laws in this first year of his term [2025] than any other modern president, and most of these bills were narrow in scope and ambition. The only major legislation was a reconciliation bill that contained a variety of provisions but was, at its core, an extension of existing tax policy.”
  2. Trump has signed fewer regulations of economic significance than Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Biden had by this point in their presidencies. Of course, regulations can have significance that is not economic, but this measure (from the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University) has the advantage of roughly distinguishing between important regulatory changes and documents that may be purely symbolic or even trivial. Based on this method, it appears that Trump has done less with regulations than his predecessors so far.
  3. As shown in the graph above, federal spending has been very similar as it was under Biden. It’s true (as Levin shows) that Homeland Security has more money and Education has somewhat less. But the reduction in Education seems to reflect planned sunsetting of COVID relief payments. In some cases, there were dramatic announcements of spending cuts (which may have caused substantial immediate damage) followed by a quiet resumption of spending. This seems to the case, for example, at NIH.
  4. Many federal employees were laid off, and many quit, for a total of about 317,000 “departures.” This matters to those people, to the capacity of federal agencies, and to the quality of public service right now. But since the positions are still authorized in law, it also means that the next president will be able to hire hundreds of thousands of civil servants.
  5. Trump has announced dramatic deals with various private entities, such as law firms, universities, and pharmaceutical companies. These deals raise serious constitutional questions and may intimidate other entities. Alas, there has been a lot of cowardly preemptive compliance. At the same time, these deals often turn out to be less consequential than they sound at first; and to a significant extent, everyone else in these sectors is proceeding as usual. Battling selected opponents makes great symbolic politics but is not an effective way to change a society. Levin says, “this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means.  But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.”

 Important caveats are required, and Levin acknowledges most of them.

First, immigration appears to be a major exception. Money is flowing to ICE, agents are being hired, and individuals and communities are being irrevocably harmed by tactics that are new or at least substantially worse than under Biden.

Second, Trump’s abuse of the Department of Justice to harass enemies is not captured on the list above.

Third, Trump style of governance may permanently change our political culture. His abuse of prosecutorial power is an important example.

Fourth, we don’t know what will happen next. Trump has won the power to replace members of regulatory commissions. Maybe these replacements will begin to enact actual regulations that matter.

Finally, his strategy may not be to change policies but to set the conditions for what Ezra Klein calls “power consolidation.” For instance, the right question may not be whether Trump’s tariffs have changed the economy. Rather, by levying tariffs at will and then excusing selected industries, countries, and firms from some tariffs, Trump has amassed power. This matters if–and to the extent that–he then uses his consolidated power for tangible purposes, such as suppressing the political opposition.

Using his power to protect himself is possible but will not be easy for Trump to accomplish. For example, his effort to interfere with the 2026 election by cajoling state legislatures to gerrymander may have produced a net Democratic advantage of about 2 or 3 seats.

Backlash to Trump may create opportunities to rewrite the rules in ways that curtail future presidents. ICE was already problematic under previous administrations. Migrants often present opportunities for governments to to abuse power. Hannah Arendt says that when World War I left a wave of stateless refugees, governments empowered their police in ways that led to dictatorship: “This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law, but had become a ruling authority independent of government and ministries.”** This passage is eerily reminiscent of ICE in Minneapolis right now. However, the US public’s turn against ICE has been dramatic, and the current structure is now entirely dependent on Trump or a MAGA successor. It is quite plausible that ICE will be abolished in 2029 or at least much more constrained in then than it was in 2020.

Here are some strategic implications of Levin’s argument.

Don’t be tempted to emulate Trump. I’ve talked with progressives who basically say, “I hate Trump’s values and goals, but he has shown us how to make change.” Levin suggests that Trump is not making sustainable or coherent change. Indeed, he is making much less tangible policy than Biden did. If you want to shift the country, there is no alternative to passing actual laws.

Work against preemptive compliance. Trump’s retail deal-making doesn’t affect the society as a whole except insofar as organizations pre-comply out of fear that he will turn to them next. All of us who have stakes in organizations must buttress their independence and press them not to acquiesce in advance.

Plan for governing when Trump is gone. For example, how should the next administration fill more than 300,000 vacancies with young talent? Now is the time to plan for that. The statutory and regulatory framework that existed under Biden may still be largely in place, offering many opportunities for hiring and spending (even if total federal outlays are trimmed).

Focus resistance on the areas where Trump is actually effective. The top of that list is immigration, and I think most of the resistance realizes this.

Bear in mind that most citizens may not see much change. Progressives are rightly alarmed about Trump and often frustrated that the electorate does not see him as we do. Trump’s popularity has declined, but the rate of decline has been less than one percentage point per month. Voters may be turning gradually away from him because they perceive high inflation, which is not a wise basis for assessing Trump or any president. One reason that low-attention voters are not more critical of Trump is that their actual lives have not changed dramatically due to the Administration. At a meeting that I attended in the industrial Midwest last fall, grassroots activists (almost all Black and urban) viewed their community’s problems as perennial and unrelated to Trump. This has implications for how the opposition should criticize Trump–not by claiming that the president has wrecked everything but by accusing him of failing to act effectively.

*Levin, “Status Quo or Revolution?” The National Review, Sept. 25; interview with Ezra Klein, “Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?,” Jan 16; and “The Levers Trump Isn’t Using,” The Atlantic, Jan 20.

** Arendt, Hannah. The Origins Of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book Book 244) (p. 287). (Function). Kindle Edition. But the public backlash to ICE under Trump has been extraordinary. As part of the reaction, the federal government may be pushed back out of immigration enforcement.

competing political science perspectives on Trump

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Political science is a heterogeneous discipline, and the various subfields are prone to interpret the Trump Administration and MAGA very differently.

  1. Comparativists compare and contrast political systems around the world. This approach could yield various interpretations of MAGA, but an influential interpretation assigns Trump to the category of modern authoritarianism, which is on the rise (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). We learn that personalist, populist authoritarians in many countries have a toolkit that works for them. They don’t cancel elections or ban parties but manipulate the system from the executive branch, subject their critics to costly investigations, apply pressure to media conglomerates to influence journalism, etc. Not every current authoritarian has succeeded–consider South Korea and Brazil. But many have prevailed, and therefore comparativists tend to be alarmed about the situation in the USA.
  2. Scholars of American political development think about this country historically, often looking not only at our government and politicians but also at culture and social movements (Smith & King 2024). They are likely to notice precedents and echoes from American history and observe that prominent current debates are about how to interpret the past. Trump may remind them less of Hungary’s Victor Orban than of segregationist politicians. They may focus less on Trump as an individual actor and more on persistent strands of nativism and white nationalism in the USA.
  3. Political theorists are intellectually diverse, but most of us spend at least some of our time reading works from a wide variety of eras and perspectives that pose fundamental questions about government and politics. A disproportionate number of these classic works discuss revolutionary change, and some of them advocate it. Consider Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau, or Marx and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, as examples. Even philosophers who oppose revolution are often primarily concerned about it. Therefore, political theorists are quick to imagine that our regime may be on the verge of breaking down. And we are prone to assign MAGA an ideological label, whether we name it populist, nationalist, neo-fascist, neoliberal, or something else.
  4. Scholars of social movements may ask whether MAGA is a bottom-up movement, but mainly they study anti-Trump movements, asking whether they will prevail and what may increase their odds of success. For example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) noticed that every nonviolent social movements that has mobilized at least 3.5% of its nation’s population has succeeded in modern times. Chenoweth recently discussed the “3.5% rule” with Paul Krugman, giving a nuanced answer to the question whether an anti-Trump movement will defeat the current administration if it can activate 3.5% of the US population. Note that in this framework, the main path of social change is not via elections but on the streets.
  5. Scholars of American government and political behavior use empirical tools of social science (analysis of voting records, surveys, and interviews or focus groups) to identify trends and patterns in US politics. They are likely to view Donald Trump as a lame-duck second-term president with approval ratings in the low 40s (and falling just lately). They see regular patterns playing out, such as the tendency for the electorate to move in the opposite ideological direction from the incumbent president. Most trends suggest that Democrats will win in 2026 and probably 2028. This framework predicts that Republicans will become burdened by an unpopular, term-limited Republican president and will begin to distance themselves from him. More basically, it assumes that elections will unfold as normal, that we will have two parties, that both will compete for the median voter, that the main vehicle for public opposition is an election, etc.

In my own writing and extracurricular work, I have been trying to support social movements against authoritarianism. Lately, I have been offering trainings–most recently at the excellent Dayton (OH) Democracy Summit — on how to resist authoritarianism from the bottom up. Here is a video of my standard talk.

Thus, I am applying the comparativists’ framework plus social movement scholarship. However, I am not completely committed to this combination. It is plausible that scholars of American government are right, and the usual patterns of US politics will reassert themselves. I am using a precautionary principle: taking preventive action in case of a disastrous outcome.

Predicting the next three years is difficult because we don’t know two crucial variables.

One variable is the performance of the economy in the next months. So far, it is holding up pretty well considering all the stress. The main indicators are not really very different from last year. Voters are unhappy but not facing an economic meltdown.

The economy could improve, boosting Donald Trump. (The Supreme Court may help by striking down the tariffs). The economy could keep puttering along. Or it could tip into a significant recession. If that happens, scholars of American political behavior would predict a realignment in favor of Democrats, and comparativists might expect Trump to attempt drastic action to save himself.

The other unknown variable is the behavior of Trump and his inner circle. They have crossed many bright lines: choosing political opponents for investigations, pardoning rioters, deploying troops in selected cities, and shuttering whole departments that are authorized and funded by statute. But they could do a lot more, such as invoking the Insurrection Act, deploying ICE against peaceful protesters, or suspending elections.

Comparativists tell us that subtler methods of authoritarian control work better in the 21st century. Using drastic methods would indicate weakness. Nevertheless, heightened drama could end with victory or defeat for Trump. The regime might succeed in suppressing opposition, or it might provoke a much larger popular response that succeeds. A common pattern is: protest –> state violence –> protests that mourn and celebrate the victims –> state violence against the mourners –> larger protests –> victory for the grassroots movement.

Finally, Trump has some personal characteristics that make him hard to classify. One is that he seems to care almost entirely about his own welfare. All other modern American presidents have wanted to enact legislation. That is the main way to change society durably. A president can only sign a bill after both houses of Congress have passed it. Therefore, all modern presidents have cared deeply who prevails in Congress.

But Trump does not seem to care about legislation. He signed nothing significant during his first term except budgetary changes. The Republicans loaded a lot of provisions into the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed on July 4, but even most of those were budgetary.

Meanwhile, Trump has radically–but perhaps not durably–changed government through unilateral executive action. Looking forward, he may not care very much whether Democrats win in 2026. He can ignore subpoenas, avoid removal by holding at least 34 votes in the Senate, and continue to govern unilaterally from the White House.

On one hand, this means that he is less likely to take drastic steps to prevent an electoral defeat in 2026. I think he has always expected to face a Democratic Congress in 2027 and 2028. He won’t pass any laws, and he may have difficulty appointing judges, but that won’t matter much to him. On the other hand, it means that no one in Congress–including congressional Republicans–will have much leverage over him. We may not see the usual pattern of the president’s party trying to constrain him to save themselves.

I think that Trump and many around him are incurring legal liability. Increasingly, as his term ends, we may see them primarily concerned about avoiding prosecution in 2029 and thereafter. Similar concerns could begin to influence private organizations that could be charged with bribery for assisting Trump. This phenomenon is common around the world–hence very familiar to comparativists. It raises questions about whether Trump will try to suppress elections just to avoid legal repercussions (although he could use preemptive pardons instead), and whether it will be necessary to negotiate an amnesty of some kind.

See also Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; Trump, Modi, Erdogan; why political science dismissed Trump and political theory predicted him, revisited. Sources: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018); Smith, Rogers M., and Desmond King. America’s new racial battle lines: Protect versus repair. University of Chicago Press, 2024 Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Columbia University Press, 2011.

Trump, Modi, Erdogan

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I am flying back to the USA after a meeting in Istanbul with activists and NGO leaders from six or more countries. (By the way, I don’t think that all of them could have met in the USA because of our government’s visa policies and treatment of visitors.)

One of the many benefits of the meeting was to challenge a framework that I have been using which treats leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as examples of the same phenomenon. These men are both similar and different, and it’s important to keep the differences in mind.

All three (it seems to me) are national narcissists, meaning that they believe their own country is the best yet disrespected (Cislak & Cichocka 2023). All espouse a form of populism: the idea that they enjoy the united support of the true nation, whereas opponents and critics are enemies of the people. All identify a favored ethnic and/or religious majority as the authentic country and its rightful rulers.

All favor aggressive state economic interventions while favoring allied businesses and industries (and making money from these alliances). All prefer splashy infrastructure projects to providing consistently decent public services. To be generous, we could say that they each “see like a state” (Scott 1998). And they all use a similar toolkit. They don’t cancel elections or openly suspend (most) constitutional rights but rather prosecute opponents and use economic pressure against the producers of speech: publishers and universities (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

As for the differences:

Modi represents a century-old effort to establish Hindu supremacy in India. Islamophobia is central to this project (Bhatia 2024). It already inspires regular violence, and it has the potential to spark vast destruction. Modi’s party and government are disciplined. Their agenda is not only social control or personal profit but also redefining a nation in a way that would exclude 200 million of its citizens.

Erdogan, I think, began by opening Turkish politics and civil society to groups and perspectives that deserved representation, including but not limited to observant Muslims. He made appropriate reforms. He is the kind of leader who should have retired a decade ago, in which case he could now travel the international circuit as an elder statesman with some genuine contributions to his name. Alas, he crossed many bright lines by jailing opponents and crushing opposition, perhaps in part because he sincerely believes that he is indispensable. But his managerial record is now quite poor.

Trump represents political views that he did not invent. He espouses familiar forms of xenophobia, chauvinism, and aggrieved nationalism. But I interpret Trump as more transactional than his counterparts in Turkey and India. For many voters, he offers a deal: better economic outcomes in return for legal impunity, the ability to settle scores, praise and monuments, and lots of sheer cash.

Since Trump’s relationships are always self-interested, they are also relatively fragile. I think an economic downturn would break his implicit contract with voters, lowering his approval by 10 points, and that would make him an increasingly problematic ally for Republican politicians. I can see him being discarded (not necessarily impeached, but rendered a lame duck) in a way that I cannot quite see for the regimes represented by Modi or Erdogan.

Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; James C . Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998)  Stevnb Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018), and Rahul Bhatia,, The New India (Abacus, 2025)

See also: national narcissism; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; the Constitution is crumbling etc.

the rule of law and the Trump Administration versus higher education

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On Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the Trump Administration sent letters to nine universities offering them financial benefits and relief from investigations if they agree (among other things) to “freeze tuition for five years,” provide “free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate,” “cap the enrollment of international students,” “commit to strict definitions of gender,” and “change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would ‘punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.'”

I have not seen the letter itself, but it refers to a “compact” document that the universities are asked to sign, and that is here. It includes, among other things, a provision that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” (Does that mean I may not publish an article about Ukraine and identify myself as a Tufts professor?) Erwin Chemerinsky says, “It would be hard to come up with a more explicit attempt to restrict freedom of speech.”

Failure to sign evidently means risking federal support, or at least facing investigations and litigation. “This Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities …. Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

Trump won the election, and elections have consequences. The Administration may write regulations governing higher education. So why doesn’t the Department of Education publish this “compact” as a regulation applying to all universities? One rule would then apply to all, and it would be transparent and predictable.

A rule would also be subject to judicial review, and colleges and higher ed. associations would have incentives to sue, arguing that the regulations exceed the statutory authorization of the Department of Education, violate the First Amendment, or both. Some or all of the regulations might survive judicial review. In any case, everyone would know the results and would have to comply with the courts’ rulings. Because the rules would apply to the entire sector of higher education in all 50 states, there might be considerable backlash from voters.

All of this–publicity, consistency, predictability, judicial review, and review by voters–constitutes the rule of law. These letters violate it.

Some institutions may willingly take the deal, and others may decide to settle even if they believe that it undermines their rights because it is cheaper to negotiate than to fight back. Already, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents has said that UT is “honored” to have been “named as one of only nine institutions in the U.S. selected by the Trump administration for potential funding advantages.”

The result will be a de facto policy, applied one institution at a time, with no judicial review. Colleges may accept deals that trade away their Constitutional rights. Possibly, students and faculty will have standing to sue their own institutions (as Jimmy Kimmel could have sued ABC), but it will be hard for third parties to challenge these “voluntary” agreements. And institutions that the Administration decides not to target will be left alone, thus reducing any backlash.

It is very important that students, faculty, and alumni of these communities advocate for their institutions not to sign the compact: University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, USC, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and UVa.

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; AAUP v Rubio; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important