Trump’s Threats to the Constitution Are Happening in Real Time, Not (Just) in a Third Term
There is no doubt in my mind that the intent of the Trump team is to retain power indefinitely, via whatever means.
To fight that effectively, you should focus your action and words on the most pressing issues before us — elections on Tuesday, legal cases before appeals courts, legal US residents in detention — rather than trying to discern the means by which Trump will codify all the actions he is taking today, yesterday, last week. The actions he is taking in real time, and their goals, are utterly transparent.
Which is why I think it a colossal waste of time that the punditocracy spent much of Sunday talking about Kristen Welker’s “report” that Trump says he wants a third term.
You don’t say?
Rather than spending the day discussing Trump’s Executive Order presuming to dictate to states how they — with the involvement of DOGE!! — must start suppressing the vote over the next months, we talked about something that might happen in 2028. Rather than spending the day talking about how Trump is already using federal funding and immigration law to silence speech protected by the First Amendment, we discussed what gimmick Trump might use in the future to evade the 22nd Amendment.
Almost no one even tried to use Trump’s comments about a third term as a way to explain the end goal of assaults on civil society, speech, and voting — to connect the actions Trump took in the last week to what he says he’ll do in 2028 — something that would at least make use of Trump’s own rhetoric to educate low-information voters. Instead, they talked about Trump’s assault on democracy in the way Trump wanted it framed — distant, allegedly constitutional, and uncertain, rather than an imminent unconstitutional assault on democracy.
What the fuck are we doing here, folks?
It’s not even clear to me what the comments were. Welker introduced her “exclusive phone interview” during the introduction to Meet the Press, specifying that Trump called her. In that intro, she focused on Trump’s threat to maybe get angry at Vladimir Putin but maybe not. It was more than a phone interview though: She played video of Trump’s comments promising to impose tariffs. The call provided almost two minutes of pure transcription of Trump’s comments — so much so that Welker repeated Trump’s claims that the Signal chat story was fake news twice, uncontested.
Trump used his phone call to Kristen Welker to get her to call journalists, to call herself, fake news.
But the comments about the third term — with or without video — were not in that clip; they were published separately, Meet the Press scooping itself, with no live pushback.
The fact that Welker brought up this plot for a third term herself, mentioning Steve Bannon (who was presenting it on another channel), suggests that was the entire point: Trump called her, she dutifully brought it up, she got video but used almost none of it, leaving only Markwayne Mullin on camera (who should never be invited as a credible interlocutor in any case) to answer for the Administration on MTP itself. Not that it mattered; Welker was even more solicitous than usual yesterday.
Trump’s genius is in managing attention: both keeping it, and directing it away and towards topics of his choosing. He has long integrated assertions about a third term into his political spiel. This is nothing new (indeed, NBC linked an earlier instance in the story). And yet NBC — along with a pack of credulous pundits — chose to focus on Trump’s third term comments all day Sunday rather on the things he did in the last week, covering up disappearances on Monday, tampering in elections on Tuesday, assaulting the independence of another law firm on Wednesday, attacking unions and whitewashing history on Thursday, compromising DC self-rule on Friday, that are obviously about a third term and beyond.
How can you have lived through that week, or any of the last nine, and have doubts about the intent here? Why do you think hypothetical discussions about assaults on the Constitution will better serve fighting back than concrete discussion and organizing about specific assaults on it?
This seems to be yet another instance where journalists and liberals, both of whom institutionally presume that language is transparent, misunderstand how authoritarians use language instrumentally and therefore forgo the most effective response to instrumental language.
Consider the following rubric as applied to yesterday’s stunt.
What is instrumental
Trump’s comments about a third term were almost certainly instrumental: part of his larger authoritarian project, perhaps an attempt to distract from the specifics of the effort and to falsely claim he has popular support, perhaps something Bannon told him to do as part of Bannon’s own pitch, perhaps an attempt to expand the Overton window on such legal gimmicks.
A decade into Trump’s authoritarian attack on democracy, pundits still let Trump hijack their attention with the spectacular nature of his speech, willfully helping to disseminate Trump’s most outrageous statements in the form he packaged them up in, almost always without filter. In doing so, they treat Trump’s power as spectacle, something to be gaped at passively, and in the process forego the rational discussion journalists and liberals claim to hold dear.
What is true
With the exception of court filings, there is almost never a reason to use Trump’s own speech as a statement of truth. In part, that’s because he lies so often, such efforts simply decline into a form of Kremlinology: “How does Trump plan to serve a third term? Will he ask JD to front for him? Will he try to change the Constitution?” This almost always has the effect of accepting the premise Trump offers, in this case that the 2028 elections would be free and fair even if Trump succeeds in dictating how states must count the vote and sharply constrains speech and civil society, the project of his last week.
This fight will be won or lost long before the 2028 election. Both Orbanism and Putinism — two of Trump’s select models — stage elections largely (in the former case) or utterly (in the latter) devoid of real contest. This fight will be won or lost in the defense of civil society, not in discussion of constitutional gimmicks years in the future.
Relying on Trump’s speech to determine what is true is all the more foolish given the abundance of evidence in plain sight you could rely on instead. Why bother with the Kremlinology when you can point to any one of six attacks on democracy in the last week? More importantly, why bother with the Kremlinology when each of those six attacks on democracy invite specific kinds of active response, whether organizational or legal? The Kremlinology invites impotence when relying instead on the plain facts invites many ways to fight back.
How to fight back against instrumental language
Every time I point out how Trump recruits self-imagined journalists to serve as his data mules, people accuse me of claiming we should ignore Trump’s speech, or that of his flunkies.
I’m not.
I’m asking people to recognize instrumental speech as such and either repurpose it or at least identify it as a way to strip its power.
In this case, for example, you could simply take Trump’s claim as a given — “Trump confirmed he wants to defy the Constitution and remain in power indefinitely” — as a way to raise the stakes for his daily assault on democracy. “His EO attacking state administration of elections is one thing he’d need to do to give illusory sanction to such an effort,” you might explain, truthfully. Or, “See? I’m not alarmist. These things Trump is doing really are about keeping power longterm. I told you so!” Use Trump’s spectacular speech, without disseminating it, to reinforce the message about the fight right in front of you.
Or you could point out how Trump succeeded in hijacking the Sunday discussion (whether or not that was the specific intent). We should have been focused exclusively on how his national security team made the US insecure by conducting sensitive discussions on Signal and how imminent tariffs will shift the tax burden away from billionaires and onto consumers. Instead, by offering Welker this claim to exclusivity, he got her to repeat lie (he’s very cross with Putin) after lie (annexing Greenland will be necessary and easy), and twice got her to call herself fake news. With no rebuttal!
When someone lies, don’t focus alone on fact checking (which only works in limited circumstances). Instead, explain the purpose of the lie. Stephen Miller lies non-stop on Xitter, and he does so because the lies about immigration he told to get Trump elected (for example, that Tren de Aragua has overrun places like Aurora, CO) are being undermined on a daily basis, in the Global Threats Assessment that doesn’t even mention the gang, much less treat it like an invasion, and in court filings showing that Miller and Kristi Noem can’t even distinguish women from men, and are using soccer tattoos as a way to attempt to claim migrants are something other than they are, and with that claim, to accrue new ways to evade due process and produce fascist propaganda. Thus far, Miller is winning this propaganda fight, hands down, because he is left largely to himself as he keeps reiterating his false claims, even in a week when he was debunked by Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence. But rather than fact checking the lies — which would treat these claims as a contested issue — simply point out that he’s telling the lie because his past lies keep getting debunked. He’s telling them to keep confusing his rubes.
As to the Welker call, the primary purpose of it may have been Trump’s claim to be cross with Putin. Trump has made a lot of effort to spin his abject capitulation to Putin as something else. He needs to do so to keep Republicans from revolting over it. Both John Cornyn and Jerry Moran raised concerns about Ukraine at the Global Threats hearing, and even John Ratcliffe offered up evidence in the Senate hearing that Ukraine is far more resilient than Trump and JD Vance are claiming publicly. But Trump’s claim to be angry is utterly discredited given the way he changed the terms of the minerals deal last week, dramatically moving the goal posts on Ukraine again, asking for further subjugation in the guise of peace. Trump’s latest emotional tantrum is not something you can fact check; maybe he really is angry that Putin is obviously dicking him around! But you can — and should — use his actions to show his tantrum is nothing more than theater, designed to hide his consistent weakness in the face of Putin’s disinterest in a deal.
Do not gape at spectacular language. Do not let it distract you from more concrete reality that can be directly addressed. That is the goal of it. Rather, neutralize it, point to it as such, rob its power.
Yes, this is infuriating. After almost 10 years of covering Trump, the media still hasn’t learned not to chase the distractions he throws out to derail a negative news cycle.
The fact that Trump wants a 3rd term is not even news. Its much less important than his ongoing threats to annex Greenland, his disdain for the economic calamity his “Liberation Day” tariffs will bring on, his attacks on the judiciary and law firms, his regime’s Stasi-like disappearing people off the street and trying to bypass due process before deporting them, the apparent widespread use of Signal by the regime to avoid complying with federal records-keeping laws, his warping of the FBI and Justice dept to be personal tools of his whims, and probably a dozen more things.
No, it’s worse than that. Most of the media are addicted to Trump as clickbait. He keeps on generating “news”, his relentless attention-seeking generating income for them. It’s a grotesque circus. A Faustian bargain: the dumbass media keep their resource stream stuttering along whilst Trump gets to maintain his tricksy messaging to the public just as Marcy’s article relates.
OT: a guest essay in the NYT from a law firm, exhorting other lawyers and law firms to stand up against Trump’s attacks:
For God’s Sake, Fellow Lawyers, Stand Up to Trump
Ms. Welker probably thought she owed Trump because he deigned to call her.
A lot of telejournalists are lazy and cowardly and would rather pluck at the low hanging fruit than stir up controversy. Trump talking about a third term is not even news. He has been talking about a third term ever since his first term.
Just note that Trump has again suggested a third term, that he would be 88 at the end of that term, and that there is a Constitutional prohibition. Then segue into his voting executive order.
I am waiting for the news media to address the elephants in the room. Much of our current foreign relations, politically and economically, is based on faulty numbers and superficial understanding. And DOGE is not aimed at government efficiency but is aimed at policy changes, reduction in services, and privatization, without Congressional involvement. The big elephant in the room is that the chaos being inflicted on the country for the benefit of the few is madness.
“I am waiting for the news media to address the elephants in the room.” Yes. And I am waiting for the media to cover the fact that, as we speak, people wearing green pants are being executed.
Regarding “Washington Week with The Atlantic.” “[I]t has struck me as being obsessed with political gamesmanship to its core. An elected official could call for executing anyone caught wearing green pants, and the panel would chew over the political implications rather than the outrageousness of the proposal itself.”
Why I’m not excited that Jeffrey Goldberg will host ‘Washington Week’
Media Nation
August 3, 2023
By Dan Kennedy
I remember when Michael Dukakis struck a fatal blow to his own campaign by accepting a hypothetical question about whether he’d oppose the death penalty for a criminal who raped and murdered his wife. It’s the same phenomenon, and I believe that unfortunately, it’s a real weakness of decent people who are unexpectedly confronted by sociopathic behavior: the unexpected venality of the sociopath inevitably puts the decent person on their heels.
Yes, it is a distractive MacGuffin. But it’s also a cudgel: Trump is threatening everyone, everywhere, that he is not going away. This bravado comes at a time when he may well crash the economy, abandon Ukraine completely, start a war with Iran, and is otherwise dismantling the USG, US society, and the rule of law.
It’s also a re-assertion of relevance with respect to the upcoming special elections. Funny thing about those elections, they are real world near-term undertakings that could upend Trump’s bluster.
It’s exhausting, but I do think there’s an opportunity in these Obvious Distraction tangents that the Democrats could seize on if they had even the first clue what they were doing. “Trump is more worried about anointing himself President for Life than bringing down your grocery bills.” “If Trump devoted even a fraction of the effort he spends crowing about a third term to lowering prices, maybe we’d all be better off, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t care one bit.” There should be Democrat-run websites with trackers showing how many EOs Trump has enacted that do nothing to address inflation. Trackers showing disruptions to public services like Social Security, FEMA disaster relief funds distribution. Trackers of preventable deaths to diseases like measles. Trackers of lawful residents who have been placed in detention without due process. That’s the use these distractionary tirades COULD serve–if we had any kind of institutional Democratic resistance instead of a bunch of hand-wringing and crossing the aisle.
He doesn’t have that kind of power. Those prices are set by corporations, and much of it *is* supply and demand. What he’s doing is *raising* prices, with his tariffs and demands.
You and I understand that, but millions of people voted for him on the premise that he was going to somehow set policies that would lower their daily expenses. They should be reminded daily of his complete failure to and disinterest in doing so.
Indeed.
Bessent’s “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream” and Trump’s “couldn’t care less” about car prices should be repeated over and over.
He DOES have power — to make prices worse. That’s a bit unwieldy, but you use the tools you’ve got. The main thing is to use that power, one transaction at a time.
Trump does have some power to affect prices. At a minimum, he has the power of the bully pulpit. At one point last week, he said that automakers shouldn’t pass on increases in costs to consumers. Just think what would happen if he sicced his right wing media attack dogs on Walmart, etc.
And he certainly exercised his authority over law firms and some caved not for principled reasons but for business reasons. He’s quite good at exerting authority even if he doesn’t legally have it.
Of course, he won’t use what power he has for the benefit of the people but he’ll give them bread and circuses to make them think he’s on their side.
60 Minutes said tariffs will increase import car prices by $5000. Trump said “Good, I hope they go up so people buy American.”
So much for lower prices, free markets, and personal choice.
Well, supply and demand, plus price gouging and monopolistic pricing.
Someone created a tracker for the Disappeared Persons:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/danielleharlow/viz/UnitedStatesDisappearedTracker/Map
Likely seems overly simply put to say all that has happened is destruction…what EO or policy has been enacted to actually build something positive – from anyone’s point of view?
On his first day in office, Trump signed an EO on “delivering emergency price relief for American families….” It included, “I hereby order the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker. This shall include pursuing appropriate actions to: lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply; eliminate unnecessary administrative expenses and rent-seeking practices that increase healthcare costs; eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the costs of home appliances; create employment opportunities for American workers, including drawing discouraged workers into the labor force; and eliminate harmful, coercive “climate” policies that increase the costs of food and fuel. Within 30 days of the date of this memorandum, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy shall report to me and every 30 days thereafter, on the status of the implementation of this memorandum.”
Has anyone asked the heads of departments what they reported on February 19? And 30 days thereafter? Is this kind of report that can be FOIAed?
I’m not even sure Emptywheel can keep track of all Donald’s EO deadlines. She’s amazing, but that’s drinking out of a firehose!
Legacy media is barely mentioning last week’s EO that attempts to gut our elections.
Expectations of anything more than stenography from well-heeled media performers is like expecting a pet dog, fat and lazy, asleep on the sofa, to suddenly bolt into the forest to become a wolf.
Good analogy
Last night:
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3llogsgmggk2o
March 31, 2025 at 9:13 AM
They’re using standards that are so loose that half the cops in the country would qualify. Tattoos? They don’t even know which ones are gang tats. If they did, they’d notice that the big gangs in this country are all on the right-wing side of the political spectrum.
It’s pretty clear their standard is “Latino with tattoos”.
These are exactly the kinds of actions that Trump’s “spectacular” diversions are intended to divert us from. I would not be surprised to learn that Miller primed him to make that call to Welker, knowing the Trump ego would enjoy the attention and needing cover for more like this.
Not for nothing, but my understanding of Boasberg’s orders was that no more renditions to third-party countries were supposed to happen. I guess Miller’s gonna push it as far as he can, with Kristi Noem as Rolex-wielding figurehead for the sick operation.
I think you nailed this one. Stephen Miller gets to push, and send Trump’s legal wizards to face the music in court. If any of Trump’s mouthpieces say “I’m tired of this, make Stephen go answer questions”, they’ll remember how utterly repellent Miller is, and find another mouthpiece to send instead.
Cruelty is the currency of the Republican Party.
“SQUIRREL!!!”
Good f–king grief, (media) people.
Marcie’s columns are the ONLY news that should be disseminated. Spread her work to X, Bluesky, Meta, or wherever possible DAILY!
Marcie isn’t the lone fighter but she’s one of my favs. Go ahead and spread the word. Thanks, Marcie, for a really good appraisal of the real issue: the attempt to take over the Government by destroying law and democracy.
“…specifying that Trump called her. [Welker].”
And that’s the tip-off, right there. His m.o. remains unchanged for over forty years, dating back to his constant calls to the likes of Liz Smith/NY Daily News, Cindy Adams/NY Post, & Sue Carswell/People with the breathless news of who he was diddling in a business deal, which starlet he was bonking, with insinuations that Ed Koch was a homosexual, etc. ad nauseum. Often calling in with transparent, stupid aliases — John Miller (curiously, the name of two local tv news broadcasters at the time) or John Barron. He was like a persistence stench floating over the metro area if the wind was wrong. Always with the same kind of lying self-promotion, fueled by his lifelong solipsism (which I think is more accurate than “narcissism.”)
So Ms Welker picks up the phone. “Oh, my God, it’s the President, calling *me*!” And he proceeds to give her the scoop — any scoop — and off we go on another exclusive, idiot adventure. It was the New York tabloids that greased Trump’s rise as a “business executive” with a constant churn of publicity. Plus ça change, unfortunately, but this time the stakes are a hell of a lot higher.
I’m from NYC and I remember Trump from that era, though I paid no intentional attention to him at the time. You capture it well.
I think you are so right when you say: “…fueled by his lifelong solipsism (which I think is more accurate than “narcissism.”
Trump’s solipsism goes underappreciated in the glaring light of his narcissism. But it is a key to what we are experiencing under his influence as a public figure. He has paradoxically managed to impose his solipsism on the world. We are compelled by his position in the world to live within his psychosis. The fact that by his second term he came to be fully harnessed as the front man for a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and right wing christianist neoconfederate fascist assholes is another thing altogether.
No, I’m pretty sure Trump believes that other people exist, else he wouldn’t be trying so hard to control everyone and everything. If only his mind is real to him he could make us all go away by ignoring us.
The distraction trick always reminds me of a magician that holds the audience’s attention with one hand in the air while the other reaches in his pocket.
With Trump, I think it’s more solipsistic flatulence: the stench attracts attention; once hooked, he plays with them at his pleasure.
I grew up watching Doug Henning and Harry Blackstone Jr. on TV. It was fun harmless entertainment because we knew it was just a trick; they didn’t lie about having special powers. It got me interested in magic; I wanted to know how they did it. I got several magic books and magic kits. I learned about misdirection. It was the start of my skepticism and my willingness to doubt what I was being shown and told.
Then we had frauds like Uri Geller who claimed to have special mental powers. James Randi made a career out of exposing frauds and hucksters. Don’t get me started on Deepak Chopra.
In college I went to see a hypnotist perform onstage in the auditorium. I watched him supposedly making several fellow students do weird things under hypnosis. The audience was cheering and laughing but I was very uncomfortable because I thought it was all fake. I kept it to myself because I wanted to fit in and not ruin their fun. Unlike magicians doing tricks this guy was claiming to have special powers. Same goes for religious frauds like Paula White speaking in tongues and summoning angels from Africa.
And then we have con artists who are so good that their victims don’t even know they’re being conned. The movie The Sting is a perfect example. Paul Newman said it best: “You gotta keep his con even after you take his money; he can’t know you took him.” We have millions of MAGAs who don’t know they’ve been taken. And I don’t think they want to know.
The fix is the final act of the con: when a grifter puts off the involvement of law enforcement to prevent marks from making their complaints official.
My notes on The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It… Every Time by Maria Konnikova (NY: Viking, 2016 ISBN 978-0-525-42741-4) are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-confidence-game-guide-to-2016.html I published them in September 2016 as a guide to the 2016 election but then nobody pays attention to me.
The sunk cost fallacy is what keeps people from admitting that they’ve been conned.
Good stuff, thanks!
Indeed, the sunken cost fallacy is a big factor here. It also explains what’s going on with R congresscritters aside from the standard explanation that “they’re afraid of Trump”. Not to diminish the very real possibility of physical violence, online harrassment and Trump-funded primaries, either. The sunken cost fallacy ensures embarrassment if those costs are abandoned and guarantees an uncomfortable immobility (aka cognitive dissonance) unless faced directly. These are situations encouraged by cult leaders to their followers all over the world, whether spiritual cult leader or political cult leader. They have a feral understanding of human psychology and have no compunction in using it.
Magas are so far down the rabbit hole, most will never realize they were conned and if they do, they’ll be too embarrassed to admit it.
“religious frauds like Paula White speaking in tongues and summoning angels from Africa.”
Just give her $1000, and she’ll ask God to send you an angel for Passover week! It’ll help you and smite your enemies! What a deal!
He’s like the Wizard of Oz. He throws distracting flash bombs everywhere to give the illusion of all powerfulness. And yet, behind the curtain is an incompetent failure. Both of them use bluster and shock as their superpower.
My apologies if Emptywheel or someone else already posted this here or other Emptywheel platforms.
“How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement” https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-think-and-act-like-a-dissident-in-trumps-america
If you want to listen to the article, Allison Gill does reading of it on today’s Daily Beans “titled 7309…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i_2Jnb3FUs&list=PLQ9q87LG9PU9Uwl1gyHKGdxsDYVl0Z2UW&index=1,
Forgot to write on the Daily Beans podcast it starts at 28:25.
I did link to the Bulwark post. I agree it is good.
Trump is not omnipotent, and the states are not powerless.
His election EO’s will not survive the court challenges sure to come. If somehow they did, I would expect multiple states to defy the EO’s, and essentially say “you and what army?” (Reminder: nationwide martial law is a physical impossibility. Do the math.)
The only way Trump remains in power past January 20, 2029, is via a military coup, and that wouldn’t really be a “third term” would it? Otherwise, somebody else- even if it’s Mike Johnson, Hakeem Jefferies, Chuck Grassley, or Patty Murray- will be sworn in as president on Inauguration day 2029.
Indeed, Trump’s call with Welker was just another media manipulating shiny object designed to shift the conversation off of the failures, crimes and atrocities of the past week.
He throws a ball out and like eager little puppies the reporters/pundits chase after it and come back to drop it at his feet, with their tails wagging eagerly to chase another.
Excellent observations and suggestions. I think your section “How to fight back against instrumental language” deserves its own post.
He’s always distracting from the present by hyping goodies in the future AKA “concepts of plans.” He’s like Belushi in the Blues Brothers. “The NEXT gig is gonna be dynamite. Huge. You’ll see.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lsD-sN-vQo&ab_channel=okidokivideos
Been doing it forever. Did it in Art of the Deal back in 1987. “On this site will be Television City and the world’s tallest building.”
And his suckers fall for it. “We need to give him a chance!”
Pure cultism. The reward, whatever it might be, is just around the corner, always slightly out of reach, never quite there, but they believe, they have faith. The pot of gold will be theirs.
Re: “elections on Tuesday“:
The 20 Elections to Watch This April Wisconsin’s high-dollar supreme court race is stealing the spotlight. But don’t miss mayoral contests all over the map, congressional special elections in Florida, and more. https://boltsmag.org/whats-on-the-ballot/guide-to-elections-in-april-2025/ Daniel Nichanian 3/26/25
And as he says on Bluesky:
I’m calling ‘vranyo’ on Welker and Trump. Vranyo, vranyo, vranyo! (Russian for when you lie and everyone knows it, but you don’t care.)
Just look back at this comment from Trump on March 16, 2025 after ‘winning’ the Golf Club Championship at Trump International Golf Club in Florida:
“I just won the Golf Club Championship, probably my last…”
https://www.mensjournal.com/sports/donald-trump-makes-telling-admission-after-golf-championship
And that came just 2 weeks after this announcement:
“President Donald J. Trump will complete his routine annual physical exam next month at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,” said the announcement, dated March 1.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-set-to-undergo-annual-physical-exam/7993713.html
So, I’d say Trump and others know his health will be substantially declining this year. He’s just jerking chains and so is Welker.
I dare him to take a treadmill stress test and post video.
I dare him to release his real medical records and tax returns. Because he’s hiding a lot of stuff.
Excellent points about instrumental narrative. I’ll add this – I believe that the real news media has a mental model about what their role is – both in society and our country as per freedom of the press. They believe they fulfill an important function and present information to do so.
Given what we have elected – a very psychologically sick, fascist authoritarian who is a compulsive manipulator – the press should think long and hard about this: Every time you interview, ask questions, report on anything with sources within the administration or Trump himself, you should put yourself in the frame of mind that you are being used and ask – what do they want me to do? What are they trying to accomplish? Assume it is sinister and scheming and then present it from that angle. If they push the idea that they are conduit for information about the administration to the back burner and look at Trump and his henchmen as the shysters they are, the press may be less likely to simply regurgitate what they are told. The motivation is everything. That is the news – the plethora of ways they are manipulating us. If I was a reporter and he called me, I would ask him what he wanted me to report – and get lots of details. Then, I’d publish the complete opposite. That would be a greater service to the American people now.
But then he would sic his DOJ on them. Just like with the law firms and universities, its cheaper and easier to go along. (How’d that Third Reich thing work?)
I believe part of Trump/Musk propaganda will preserve the illusion we will hold elections again forever. It provides a catharsis. This allows us to tolerate the abuse of our rights, the hope we will be free again someday.
In my privileged youth I remember René Girard saying an American Presidential election is a form of sacrificial ritual. Each holds the other in effigy. You can vote the President out. There is a beautiful willingness like Christ in how an ex-President accepts their fate, so the sacred king / sacrificial victim duality applies. This is for an enlightenment society based on reason, he was saying.
Trump and Musk know they will be hated. It’s predictable. Stalin, Mao, and Hitler were hated. Putin is surely hated. Hatred is beside the point. There are ‘polls’ of Russians, but the will of the Russian people is not something that is an issue to itself. Everybody likely identifies with this sense of dismal hopelessness. The Trump/Musk regime is a politically hapless implosion. Maybe we don’t need to feel hopeless. They make as many crises and they intend. They may even scapegoat themselves. This has never been attempted where what fascism is replacing was obviously better, so the illusion we still have rights will be preserved as long as possible.
Sorry I am going a little long on this, but I believe you can’t have free elections in a country without habeus corpus. Even in the Roman Empire there was the right of habeas corpus. Approximately one third of the population was enslaved. Often a citizen would be picked up by accident as an escaped slave. How would you feel if you were crucified? It might take two or three days to get you down, and you don’t come back from that! The end of habeas corpus represents the constitution of totalitarianism because it is the end of law in its fundamental ontology as the social production of truth. You can’t have free elections without functioning courts. In getting us to talk about the 2028 election, Trump is lying in the premise. Trump/Musk intend for us never to have elections again in the way we understand them. I think this is true.
366 words. -__-
When you feel compelled to say, “Sorry I am going a little long on this,” you need to stop and edit and pare down your comment, asking yourself, Does this comment contain something new or is this just opinion likely shared among community members here? With that in mind you could stopped after your second paragraph.
You could make that comment a macro. :-)
Marcy, All your posts are amazing. This one particularly so… had to read it twice to fully digest. Just brilliant.
Step two, as always for the media after Trump sends them on their goose chase, is to begin to sanewash or rationalize the idea. That way, when we get to that stage his cults members are inoculated from reality or concern for the Constitution or law and order, or their health, the economy, or democracy etc…
Already Politico has a story out about 4 ways Trump could snatch a third term. Trump’s prep work yesterday is already working as intended.
It is a safe topic for the news media to discuss. It is so far in the future that it is more like a hypothetical. It’s far less dangerous than discussing Trump’s present dangerous actions.
Also, it’s never too early to start a 2028 horserace narrative, amiright?
Add in some evergreen “Dems in Disarray” and the media will chase it like 5-year-olds on a soccer ball.
I used to go to the brown bag lunches at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center where big name journalists would talk and take questions from a small group of people. What I learned there over the years was that journalists often don’t see the forests for the trees but even more often they don’t see the trees for the leaves. The Meet the Press discussion is an example of that, as is any kerfuffle over a misplaced word.
Another example is all the discussion about the Signal chat which only rarely, very rarely as time goes on, mentions the fact that having such a conversation on Signal violates public records and freedom of information laws just by existing. Everyone in that conversation except the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg broke the law by participating. Concentrating on a leaf to avoid both the trees and the forest once again.
Also, we know about this only because they accidentally added a journalist. It is very likely that there are many many more such conversations that took place on an app on unsecured devices. It is likely that this was or maybe still is the routine. Yet, no one is trying to investigate what is the scope of the problem and is it still happening. They pretend the problem was Goldberg, and even those who accept that the problem is Trump/Hegseth/Waltz don’t see it as a broader scandal.
Even the isolated case was bad enough to make itself the main story for a week, so Trump had to come up with multi-front attack to distract us. I was wondering the whole week what is Trump going to do, so here it is: third term, “liberation day” tariffs, threatening to bomb Iran, saying that he is maybe angry at Putin (and maybe not?). And it works.
Unfortunately Karma works on its own time, not on our time or when we want Karma to happen. But when it happens, there is no mistake that it was Karma that happened.
Unfortunately, “Karma” doesn’t “work” on its own time, your time or anyone else’s time—in fact, believing “Karma” exists requires a huge error in logic.
As Lennon said, “Whatever gets you through the night/Is alright, is alright.”
He also wrote, “Instant Karma,” which is a great song, but also a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Jen Psaki’s editors and staff do not seem to have gotten the memo. Neither did congresscritter Dan Goldman. Imagine how much differently Pete Buttigieg would have answered the same inane questions.
He told us during his campaign that if we elected him we’d never have to go to vote again! Problem is we never believed what he was telling us!
Who is “us” and “we”? Because most of this community knew better; we here were not his audience.
Welcome to emptywheel.
Good article.
Getting excited about the next election, not so much. It is what is happening right now people might want to focus on. Trump says he is going to run for a third term. Fine, let him talk. The guy is 78 (I think), The next election in 3 yrs and change, he could be dead. as could some of his older enablers. Musk could jump with a cheese hat on, land improperly and break his neck or go bankrupt. Its important to plan for the future but its best to focus on the here and now given what is happening right now.
The MSM isn’t doing as good a job as they ought to be. There isn’t much covering of demonstrations by voters or the federal employees. Not much about the impact of what is happening here and now. Some of the channels simply bring in a bunch of talking heads and “discuss” what is going on. We know what is going on. We’ve seen the political theatre presented by Noem and others. It isn’t as good as the Nazi’s were, but then they did have a better film director.
I’m surprised at one level that large law firms are rolling over and major universities aren’t doing much of anything to fight back. Of course I’m sure it has more to do with their personal wealth than anything else. People need to understand, Trump may “forgive” them now but black mailers always come back. You deal with them by either telling them go ahead and see what happens or beat the crap out of them, by non violent means. When I look at political/enviornmental fight backs over the past 90 years or so, the people who came before us did a better job of advocating/fighting for change.
OT-kinda, from The Guardian: Cory Booker breaks record for longest Senate speech with Trump condemnation
I think now I want to find this on C-SPAN and watch a few hours of it. I don’t know if this kind of thing could ever break through to normies, but I’m in favor of Democrats trying all sorts of stuff until they find something that does.
Here it is on C-Span: Senate Session March 31, 2024
https://www.c-span.org/program/us-senate/senate-session/657877 [30:20:41]
There were a lot of people watching;
https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3lls2yurefk2x
April 1, 2025 at 7:53 PM
On C-Span, Booker starts at about the 4:00 hour mark…
at 7:00 PM ET [upper right corner]
Wow. I’m almost 2 hours into it now and Senator Booker is reading quotes from dozens of constituent letters imploring him to try and stop the Trump regime from cutting Medicaid.
Listening to the testimonies of these Americans is so powerful. Republican lawmakers show their true colors when they’re willing to savagely cut Medicaid even though it will devastate the lives of so so many of their citizens.
Every accusation is a confession.
————————————
RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY
Executive Order
March 27, 2025
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.
———————————
That’s just the beginning of the first paragraph and already the bullshit is neck-deep.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-civil-war-monument/
A plaque displayed on a golf course owned by President Trump commemorates a Civil War battle that never happened. “How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”
Again, thank you for this excellent post. You’re amazing.