In this case, passports.
American historian and biographer. Pulitzer Prize for History for "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America" Pulitzer Prize for Biography & National Book Award for Nonfiction for "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt”
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In this case, passports.
This will be remembered as the Latinos Must Carry Their Papers At All Times decision.
Kavanaugh basically says, If you’re a Latino and a citizen, f*ck you, prove it. He’s saying, If you’re a Latino citizen, you better carry your papers with you at all times. Imagine if it were a question involving owning or carrying a firearm. He’d be screeching against law-enforcement overreach.
bsky.app/profile/chri...
Seriously. Abolish the Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice Roberts and his extremist majority have turned it into an enemy of the Constitution and the rule of law. They must go. The court must be rethought and remade.
SCOTUS held that the administration would suffer irreparable harm if it simply had to wait for a full hearing with public arguments before it could start snatching anyone who seems Latino, & that U.S. citizens so snatched have no rights worth protecting. No point in even having a Supreme Court now.
True. There was an argument about what was better for growth—a help-the-top or help-the-middle-and-bottom approach. Personally I think the latter works better for growth as well as social welfare. But my point is we all believed GOP policies were genuinely intended to help corporations and growth.
Amen.
Reads like hyperbole but is not
In our old politics, most acknowledged that conservative policies helped big business and, sure, encouraged growth. The question was how much should government do to protect the public interest. Trump hurts the public interest AND big business. Dictatorship is bad for everyone but the dictator.
Seven years ago today I lost my teacher, Mori Masataka, 9th Dan. I have practiced traditional Shotokan karate-do for 45 years; I'm lucky to have spent most of them as the student of Mori Sensei. Honest, incorruptible, uncompromising, he was a true master of Japanese budo. His memory is a blessing.
(Apologies to Steven Mazie for screenshotting three of his posts, but they neatly presented the stakes in one image.)
Chief Justice Roberts complains about critics of the high court. Then he gives the OK to racial profiling via the shadow docket, with no hearing. It's pretty clear that he just wants Democrats to shut up and let Republicans, including SCOTUS, finish the work of destroying the Constitution.
If we are to restore a constitutional democracy after Trump, we will have to do something about this completely illegitimate Supreme Court majority.
BREAKING: By an apparent 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court halts an injunction that had prevented immigration agents from racially profiling Latinos in central California. Sotomayor, dissenting, says the decision is "unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation's constitutional guarantees."
It's worth reminding Americans that one of the things that chilled Japan Inc's involvement in China was the risk that the PRC would detain its workers, so you really can't underestimate the chilling effect the Hyundai raid will have on foreign investment
Ahem
Your president is a disaster.
"I do not believe that it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils." —Theodore Roosevelt to Senator Thomas C. Platt, May 8, 1899
Maybe, though that implies more cross-government coordination and rational planning than I suspect the Trump administration is capable of. I bet that the boss's broad declarations & pressure by radical underlings like Weenie Nazi lead lower-levels of officials to try to please them with big raids.
But all of it depends on winning elections. So fight by every lawful means available to make sure we *have* elections, as fair as we can make them. Dictatorship & our failing economy are inextricably linked. Dictatorship & American decline are inextricably linked. Drive that message home. 6/6
Discrediting the factors of (2) must be on the agenda now as well. The Unitary Executive Theory must be destroyed by legislation & driven out of law schools. Conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr & the J-6 monsters Trump put in the government must be hounded out by constant pressure. Elevate facts. 5/6
Items in (3) can be defeated soon, with focused effort. We have to try, at least, to take back Congress & fight in the courts to stop the dictatorship: presidential tariffs, university takeovers, ICE as a secret police force, the destruction of federal agencies, occupation of cities, etc., etc. 4/6
We are seeing an example of the role of the individual in history. Many long-term trends, particularly in the Republican Party, made Trump possible. But it took this one weird individual to capitalize on them and take politics to a point that even many GOP radicals never foresaw. 3/6
The roster of nightmares in (3) must be fought first and foremost until beaten. Those in (2) must be fought immediately as well as they are integral to Trumpism, but ending them will take generations. We can't forget (1). We should ponder how to fix them, but first Trumpism must be defeated. 2/6
🧵 We have 3 buckets of political problems. 1) Longterm issues like wealth disparity & money in politics. 2) Existing factors that Trump amplifies: the "unitary executive" theory, conspiracy theories, etc. 3) Trump-specific elements: his quest for dictatorial power & fixed ideas like tariffs. 1/6
Nothing makes me angrier than when someone is so extreme that they force Rand Paul to agree with me. When a lunatic asshole extremist thinks someone is a lunatic asshole extremist, we are living in bad times indeed.
⚠️DEFYING RFK Jr’s CDC—The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) reaffirmed its support for COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant women, breaking from flawed advice in the most recent CDC immunization schedule set by RFK Jr. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made myriad false and misleading claims as he fielded questions examining his seven-month tenure leading the nation’s health agencies at a contentious three-hour hearing. Here’s a closer look at the facts.
Despicable. Despicable. Despicable.
Up next: Mike Johnson says Donald Trump was an FBI confidential informant inside the January 6 attack, trying to take down whoever instigated the assault on the Capitol and then pardoned the insurrectionists.
Gee, I don’t know, Washington Post. Do you think maybe it’s because Trump sees the White House as dictator fantasy camp?
Next press conference: “Mr. War Secretary, what’s your strategy with your war-fighting lethal warriors in Chicago? Mulching or more of a leaf-blowing thing? Is it the blowing? Will you be going into parks and blowing a lot?”
Sending the military into cities is what the American Revolution was waged against. But I will say this: It’s hilarious that, after Hegseth thumped his chest about how “Department of War” meant lethality, he is now in charge of a bunch of gardeners being deployed domestically against nothing.
* Why won’t the Fed save us? I’ll defer to an economist, but as I read the situation, lowering rates and pumping in money will only make inflation worse while tariffs & deportations still crimp prospects for growth. Stagflation is hard to beat. The conditions Trump has created make it impossible.
The only reason we didn’t have a stagflationary recession in Trump’s first term is that people around Trump held him back. The Fed will not save us. The only way we don’t crash now is if Trump reverses course hard. With courtiers like Little Kevin Hassett & Weenie Nazi, Trump ain’t doing that.
Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.
Again, war is a temporary emergency. The American way of war was to have a tiny standing army; states raised regiments to serve during the emergency. We even had a naval militia. The permanent, global, robust military after WW2 did not fit that model. It was for defense. “War Department” is silly.
Nothing says, "Hey international companies, bring your manufacturing to the US" like arresting 475 workers at a Hyundai (70% of whom are South Korean).
Also the Oval Office now looks like the set of a sitcom.
Silly. The change from War to Defense reflected a much more robust and permanent military establishment. “War” means a temporary phenomenon, an emergency in which the states would help the very small standing army fight. A post-WW2 global military presence meant it was no longer just about war.
Jobs report summary: Trump is a fracking moron who is single-handedly killing the economy as the Republican Party gushes, “Brilliant move, sir!” I hope that helps.
To be fair, I have had it up to here with all this tepid lethality.
The Pakled Presidency. “We changed Defense to War!”
This is truly the Pakled Presidency.
Silly. The change from War to Defense reflected a much more robust and permanent military establishment. “War” means a temporary phenomenon, an emergency in which the states would help the very small standing army fight. A post-WW2 global military presence meant it was no longer just about war.
If you're reading this, you probably agree that RFK Jr is such a mamzer that if there is no hell, a just deity would create one just for him. Here's FactCheck.org's compendium of Robert Dunning Kruger Jr's lies & distortions prior to his arrogant tantrum yesterday. www.factcheck.org/person/rober...
There's a feature I added to "The First Tycoon" that I wish I'd see more often: a bibliographical essay. Since it was the first full biography of this major figure, I explored the sources and archives at length. Still quite useful for economic & business historians. Plus it tells the tale of a hoax!
Trump continues to destroy manufacturing. Another 12,000 factory jobs lost, his own handpicked labor statistics boss reports. And then there’s this: ICE raided a new high-tech battery factory construction site, arresting executives as well as workers. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...
Ok, yes, this answer is bonkers, and it’s amazing it seems like he can’t lie about not lying well. But the REALLY striking thing is that this question is getting asked at all.
He feels free to lie to all senators, but he’s a special kind of asshole when women challenge him. Example:
To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, a man who is in the wrong is the quickest to take offense.
Four years ago, I tested for COVID. I'd had dinner with someone with cancer the night before. Thanks to the vaccine, I did not give that dinner companion COVID. And I only ran a low-grade fever for a few days. Fuck that idiot RFK Jr. and the equally stupid buffoon who hired him.
And yet, fully implementing the Pendleton Act took decades in the face of persistent resistance. Like the income tax, it was one step forward, one or two steps back, one or two steps forward.
HE’S NOT A F%#£ING SCIENTIST! It’s the HHS secretary’s job to communicate and act on the consensus of the scientific community, not to pretend he’s a scientist. He won’t even talk to actual scientists because he knows they’ll tell him he’s full of it. RFK Jr is “do your own research” in human form.
I post history because we need to remember that our best rules and institutions took generations to develop. We fought for decades for a nonpartisan civil service, independent regulatory agencies, safe food & drugs, voting equality, etc., etc. And Trump’s blowing them up like they were nothing.
Looks like somebody wants the Nobel War Prize!
This sounds juvenile—because it is—but it’s of a piece with his announcement that he will have the military proclaim foreign civilians to be drug dealers and summarily murder them. It’s a massive concentration of power in the hands of a cretinous man-baby. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/u...
Trump often says this, as if mass insanity ended a golden age. The tariff era gave the income tax—repeatedly! It worked in the Civil War. Congress reinstated it in 1894; SCOTUS struck it down in 1895. Congress passed the 16th Amendment in 1909; ratified in 1913. It was obviously better & fairer.
There is no master plan. Trump is a decrepit, cretinous egomaniac who has no idea what he’s doing.
Robert Dunning Kruger Jr.
Funny story: Just the number of dead beyond one million—somewhere between 300,000 to 500,000—would by itself be one of the deadliest events in American history. The only thing that brought deaths down to a level we could stand (because deaths do go on) was vaccination. Which RFK Jr wants to end.
Hallucinations don’t come from the sources you train AI on. The problem is it is an LLM- a language learning model. It is trying to sound like human language but it doesn’t actually “know” what those words mean so occasionally it strings them together in a way that makes no sense or is inaccurate.
Historians in the future will be fascinated by this extraordinary phenomenon: After the deadliest event in American history, a pandemic that cost 1.5 million lives, a major political party concluded that it must abandon the one thing that saved us: vaccines. I foresee entire journals devoted to it.
Most of all, Robert Dunning Kruger Jr is such an arrogant prick. You can tell Trump does not care about public health in the slightest, because as an arrogant prick himself he usually can’t abide competition in the ego space. But RFK Jr is obsequious enough that he gets his own demolition derby.
Funny story: Doctors once were overwhelmingly Republican. These days a GOP registration should be grounds for losing your license to practice medicine.
Sure, he said this, true. But he went on to say, “ Scientists are witches! Burn them! Burn them!”
Historians in the future will be fascinated by this extraordinary phenomenon: After the deadliest event in American history, a pandemic that cost 1.5 million lives, a major political party concluded that it must abandon the one thing that saved us: vaccines. I foresee entire journals devoted to it.
Well said.
Tariffs are not only a regressive tax on consumers, they are a tax on American manufacturers and small businesses. Let that sink in.
MAGA is basically an ongoing “worst human being on the planet” contest.
Why are there still “Trump campaign officials”? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
He screens out anyone equipped or inclined to bring up facts and disagree. Same way RFK Jr refuses to meet with actual experts. Egomania is fragile.
This guy is just basically a much more effective unabomber.
I wonder what this mishegas is going to do to NG retention and new enlistments. “Be kept away from your job indefinitely to pick up trash and oppress your fellow Americans” doesn’t have the appeal Trumpists think it has. I mean, the people who like that kind of thing are signing up for ICE.
This is what’s so obscene about Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian and history museums. A happy-face version of history is a history without progress. I don’t mean that history is a linear progression or constant uplift, just that we must understand confrontations with wrong. Wonder if one is coming.
The Blood & Soil argument has it backwards. Almost everything good about America came from confronting what was bad. Facing monarchical abuses led to a republic—government by the people. Facing slavery—no, pro-slavery extremists—led to abolition & civil liberties as well as civil rights. Etc.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is the ur-text of this administration. The demand that everyone constantly ratify Trump’s or RFK Jr’s imbecilic departures from reality screens out people with expertise and competence.
Totally agree with this important point. Of course, it exists because we have an authoritarian regime of personal rule. The boss is a cretinous egomaniac who has built a system of incentives and punishments to generate praise for & enforce his fantastical notions. His henchmen are obsequious morons.
Not surprisingly, his HHS secretary is also a cretinous egomaniac who has reproduced the same system designed to screen out reality and ratify his absurd and dangerous ideas. Something’s gotta give. Something big. Then a lot of things. It will be bad.
Totally agree with this important point. Of course, it exists because we have an authoritarian regime of personal rule. The boss is a cretinous egomaniac who has built a system of incentives and punishments to generate praise for & enforce his fantastical notions. His henchmen are obsequious morons.
Telling Catholics and Jews they have no place in the Republican Party–or the United States—is a pretty bold strategy. I encourage them to lead with that.
A good piece in response to Trump’s addled post about the COVID vaccines. The data is all public. We’ve just had a massive real-world experiment, and the vaccines proved a huge success. I’ve lost a half-dozen friends & family, none vaccinated—some, sadly, by choice. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/h...
Given the rising insanity of Trump’s lies, I expect he’ll soon announce that since he’s been president we’ve put 100 astronauts on the moon, life expectancy has grown so much it can’t be measured with clocks now known to science, and he’s been asked to be the next queen of England.
Trump should just come out and lie that GDP growth since he took office has been not 1% or 2%, but 50%. All because of import taxes. At least that way the people who pay no attention would realize he's just pulling numbers out from under his girdle.
Apple is sneaking AI into everything. Turn off enhanced visual search on your photos:
Trump today claimed that since he's been president we've received $17 trillion in foreign investment, thanks to tariffs. OK, so we no longer pay a lot of attention to his lies. But really. More than half of the entire U.S. gross domestic product in 2024? Equal to almost all of China's GDP? Jesus.
It is hard to fathom what a catastrophe this is. Trump is single-handedly wrecking the economy, destroying American global primacy, and is bringing on a fiscal disaster we have never seen before. The war on immigrants is a war on all of us. www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-pop...
If you’ve ever compared unvaccinated kids to vaccinated kids, you’ve seen the former are more likely to die.
Comparative advantage.
Bizarre. Giuliani isn’t mayor of anything. Also a very strange press release.
He’s providing them with valuable mulching experience though.
What do we mean by a “crank”? It’s not someone who asks unusual questions. It’s not someone who challenges orthodoxy or even runs an outlier study. It’s someone who cherry-picks data and studies to fit preexisting ideas—someone who says he alone knows better than the scientific community. RFK Jr.
This is what makes the con artist RFK Jr so dangerous: the word “seems.” He has developed a talent for sounding like a scientist. He isn’t one. But he seems to have fooled himself into believing he’s god-emperor of science. Deep down he must know it’s a lie. Hence his rage at being challenged.
Destroying federal capacity is core to Trumpism. Even the capacity to do what all Americans agree is necessary.
Destroying federal capacity is core to Trumpism. Even the capacity to do what all Americans agree is necessary. The National Security Council isn’t just a collection of eggheads. It provides research, planning, & depth of knowledge & experience that allows us to act intelligently in a crisis.
Destroying federal capacity is core to Trumpism. Even the capacity to do what all Americans agree is necessary.
Funny story: some people actually believed that Trump would focus deportation efforts on criminals.
Intellectually I’m offended by just how simplistic our aged, cretinous ruler is. When writing about history, I like to be surprised, to be forced to rethink my assumptions, to encounter a counterintuitive reality. But Trump’s septic tank of bad ideas overflows in a monotonous stream of narcissism.
We won’t notice it at first Maybe an outbreak of cholera in southwest Kansas goes undetected Perhaps the number of flu related deaths ticks up just a bit each year But-ultimately, inexorably-the destruction of the CDC will lead to countless deaths All because of two men Trump and RFK, Jr
