Our president is too dangerous, too unwell, too much of a fascist. Plus, the latest on the Mar-a-Lago shooter and his politics, and the Democratic Party finally, almost, admits the truth about Gaza.
Negotiators will meet again on Thursday to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program.
The ruling blocking the “Liberation Day” tariffs has thrown trade deals into doubt and heaped uncertainty on global business, analysts said.
ICE agents don't care if you're a frail senior citizen; they'll still delight in the opportunity to inflict some physical punishment.
This Tuesday night, America will bear witness to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term. I know—the mere thought of it rots a little piece of our souls that we’re never getting back. At least you can skip it; I have to watch it. When I was young, I used to love the pageantry of State of the Union addresses. Even when Ronald Reagan was president, the part of me that honored our democratic customs enjoyed tuning into the C-SPAN pregame show, as it were, and watching the senators and House members file into the chamber, along with the Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices. The first lady would take her seat in the gallery, alongside invited guests. I liked watching the president standing outside the rear door, and I loved hearing the clerk of the House—in Reagan’s time, he was appointed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and thus spoke with a Boston accent as heavy as clam chowder—bellow: “Mistah Speakah, the president of the United States!” Reagan would go on to spend the next hour and change promoting ideas and policies that I found largely repugnant. Even so, I appreciated the ceremony of the event. The State of the Union, like the opening day of a new session of Congress or the certification of electoral ballots, helped anchor our democracy—the address was as good a roadmap as any to what we’d be debating over the course of the next year. In addition, even as I objected to Reagan’s views, I understood him to be committed, in his way, to the broad American experiment in representative government and to ensuring its continued existence.We cannot say remotely the same of Donald Trump. He is largely and proudly ignorant of those traditions; to the extent that he grasps them, he has contempt for them. He is interested in unlimited power and in squeezing every corrupt dollar out of the presidency that he can cram into his pockets. And he’s in desperate need of the fulsome and brain-curdling sycophancy of those around him, a hallmark of both a weak, insecure man and a leader with an undeniably fascistic personality. The only thing keeping him from facing accountability for very real crimes is the supplication of his fellow GOPers in Congress, who have readily accepted being beaten down into cultlike submission.These things and many more enrage millions of Americans. That rage is given expression every day, in streets protests all over the country, in social media posts, and in columns for those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to write them. But there’s another emotional current that courses through the bloodstreams of the majority—and yes, it is a majority—that dislikes and disapproves of Trump. It isn’t discussed as much as rage, because it doesn’t get as many clicks and perhaps isn’t thought to change as many minds. But it’s still important that we note it and give it its due. It is sadness. Many millions of Americans are absolutely heartbroken at what Trump and his menagerie of moral misfits are doing to our country.We cannot believe the things being done in our name, and we are sick over it. The shootings, violent and point-blank and wanton, of citizens. The rounding up of noncitizens who may have come here illegally (but also may not have, as we’ve seen in some cases; even a handful of citizens have been detained) but have been living law-abiding lives who now find themselves thrown into what are essentially concentration camps living in unbearable conditions. The idea that some Americans are well advised to be carrying their papers, as if we’re living in a police state. There are also the relentless assaults on public health. The completely unnecessary outbreak of measles, a disease that shouldn’t even exist but is multiplying in this country in part because of RFK Jr.’s promulgation of ignorant lies that the vaccine causes deaths. More sickness and death will be on the way when RFK Jr.’s batty and shockingly irresponsible policies fully kick in. The United States is now an anti-science country, explicitly comparable to the Soviet Union under Lysenko, who, like Kennedy, spouted absurd theories and claims, denying scientific reality to satisfy the regime’s ideological imperatives. I could fill pages with these indictments. The horrifying and plainly illegal sinking of those boats. The illegal military action in Venezuela. The clearly unethical legal pursuit of those Trump regards as political enemies. The primal urge to remake the physical landscape of the nation’s capital in his fascist image. This last is a minor thing, compared to the actions that are doing real harm to real people by the millions, but in its way, it is no less repulsive: These moves prove that Trump believes that he is the state and he needs to be glorified in a manner we associate with ancient emperors and totalitarian madmen, not democratically elected leaders who are servants of the people. The corruption: Its scale is nearly impossible to comprehend, which I suppose is the point. The New York Times found last month that Trump had made at least $1.4 billion since reentering the Oval Office, but the paper emphasized that “we know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.” To watch someone abuse the presidency like this is sickening to many millions of Americans.And worst of all, in a way, is the cocoon of fantasy in which he lives. He surrounds himself with flatterers and flunkies. He spends his weekends surrounded by extraordinarily wealthy people who have no idea what working people’s lives are like and who know that if they want his attention for 10 minutes, they must tell him that he is the greatest president ever. This is ridiculous, but it is not just ridiculous: It’s profoundly undemocratic and destructive. It is not how democratically accountable leaders live. This totalitarian-style toadyism will be on full display Tuesday night. Trump will tell lie after lie about the economy, about his tariffs, about America being the “hottest” country in the world, about countless other things, and congressional Republicans will interrupt him 40 or 50 times with rapturous applause. Yes, Democrats interrupt their presidents with applause excessively too, but Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and for that matter George W. Bush—weren’t openly engaged in a war on democracy. Trump is, and Republicans in Congress are cheering him every step of the way.It’s enraging, but it’s also heartbreaking and disgusting, to see this malicious buffoon and his evil and cowardly minions destroy the world’s oldest democracy and congratulate themselves for doing so. They are an affront to everything we have, or once had, to be proud of as Americans. To one degree or another, most of the country now feels this way, and that, this week, is the real state of this union.
Imposing censorship is, the science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, “like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” In Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, a young girl stands in for the baby, and modernist literature, particularly James Joyce’s Ulysses, is the red meat. Morgan’s book is a biography of Margaret Caroline Anderson, founder of The Little Review, a literary magazine that ran from 1914 to 1929 and had the distinction of being the first to publish extracts from Ulysses in the United States—a fact that also makes it a cautionary tale of censorship run amok.Anderson and her circle deeply felt the trauma and revolt accompanying America’s controversial entry into the Great War in April 1917. Her sometime partner and co-editor, Jane Heap, wrote sarcastically in June of that year: “It is a great thing to be living when an age passes.” The 1910s had once appeared a period of flowering for the avant-garde writers, artists, and movements surrounding The Little Review that were now suddenly running up against wartime censorship. Alongside friends like anarchist Emma Goldman and leftist newspaperman Floyd Dell, Anderson and Heap mourned the erosion of free speech and the reinvention of the government as a propaganda machine out to silence or deport any questioners. President Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 targeted any speech that could be interpreted as interfering with the war effort, and criminalized any possibly disloyal speech against the government, flag, Constitution, or military. Law enforcement zoned in on pacifists, socialists, and other anti-war protesters.The repression of the war years left a lasting effect on American culture in the following decades. “The Great War may have been over, but a violent culture war had taken its place,” Morgan writes, “with capitalism, WASPs, and Victorian-era values on one side and anarchism, socialism, immigrants, and modern ideas like birth control and women’s suffrage lumped together on the other.” The Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920 marked the early convulsions of the first Red Scare, as federal agents attacked leftist bookstores, printers, and union halls, arresting thousands and deporting hundreds.Somehow, it was in this atmosphere that The Little Review nurtured some of the most daring literature of the century. The Little Review published T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and James Joyce, among many others. This great, long-vanished magazine was of and for the modernists. Within that group, it was a beacon and a rallying force. “In all the world there is no such thing as an old sunrise, an old wind upon the cheeks, or an old kiss from the lips of your beloved,” Sherwood Anderson editorialized in an early issue, “and in the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new.”The conditions that Margaret Anderson and her contemporaries worked in have often been considered an exceptionally repressive moment in American history. Yet, as historians such as Adam Hochschild have recently remarked, the government-imposed limits on free speech and unabashed attacks on writers of that time are in some ways “eerily similar” to our own moment, with its attacks on the press and blocking of funds for scientific research focused on race, gender, and transgender issues. What is perhaps most striking about Morgan’s history is how precarious free speech has been in American history, and how exceptional a climate of free expression. Free speech protections as we have recently known them were not affirmed until the 1960s. The ACLU emerged from the aftermath of the first Red Scare, but so did a culture in which suppression was normalized.Margaret Anderson was charismatic, queer, and cutting. Born in 1886, she already had unusually deep feelings about language even as a child. (When she learned that the word “ball” wasn’t spelled “boll” as she thought it should be, she felt “a resentment against God or man for having imposed an incredible stupidity upon the world.”) Her youth in Indiana was a lonely struggle, for the most part. She began finding a trace of steady happiness only after a slightly scandalous move to Chicago: She stayed at the YWCA and was soon cut off by most of her genteel Midwestern family. She was exactly where she was meant to be. “I always edit everything,” she wrote, in a kind of manifesto of the self. “I edit people’s clothes.… tones of voice, their laughter, their words.… It is this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor.” One of her employers was Francis Hackett at the Chicago Evening Post, who would go on to become the founding literary editor of The New Republic.Anderson’s early professional life flourished in Chicago, and the book is in part a love letter to the city. Chicago gave her a place to find her voice without feeling it was being shaped or modulated by an existing aesthetic. English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy wrote Anderson in a letter, “… what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turns febrility and torpor.” She would later find New York crawling with coteries, conducive to that very febrility and torpor, and, though she eventually traded the United States for France, she kept Chicago in her heart.Working out of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, Anderson started The Little Review there in 1914. The precariousness of the project, especially when it came to money, was no match for her will power and imagination. “My greatest enemy is reality,” she would write in the opening pages of her memoir. She had covers printed with the words, “Making No Compromise With the Public Taste.” For the summer months of 1915, after running out of cash and losing her apartment, Anderson moved into a lakeside tent compound and edited The Little Review “by the light of a flaming gasoline torch.” Emma Goldman visited, grumbled about mosquitoes, and demurred when Anderson—clad in a baby-blue bathing suit—urged her to take off her clothes.Jane Heap came into Anderson’s life around the same time. Heap, who had grown up on the grounds of an insane asylum in Kansas, was in Anderson’s experience “a hand on the exact octave that is me.” She wore men’s clothes and was one of the most brilliant conversationalists of her age. Like Anderson, Heap looked askance at the grand ambitions and derivative methods of most of the writers finding success around them. Once Anderson persuaded her to join the Review’s editorial staff, she took to the work as a vocation. “Here,” Heap wrote in a review typical of her voice, “is another man who hasn’t written the great American novel.”After a vagabond summer in California, Anderson and Heap decamped for Manhattan in 1917. They had to use the cheapest possible printer for The Little Review, and their new foreign editor, Ezra Pound, was enraged by the typos that resulted. Yet from the start, Pound identified strongly with the tiny and perpetually struggling magazine. “One does not want to see the country sink back into the arms of Harpers and the Atlantic,” Pound wrote Anderson, disdainful of the establishment magazines and their predictable contents. (Her feelings for Pound mixed reverence with eye-rolling. Meeting him in Paris in 1923 was, she wrote, like “watching a large baby perform its repertoire of physical antics gravely.”)Through its 15-year lifespan, the magazine grew into a modernist colossus. It never paid anybody, and it always urgently needed money. What little there was came from donors who were sometimes teased to their faces. Pound called John Quinn, an attorney who subsidized each of Pound’s contributions to The Little Review and later defended the magazine’s right to publish extracts from Joyce’s Ulysses, “my capitalist.” The price of an annual subscription to the Review was one dollar higher than the more established periodical Poetry, but Anderson reasoned it held something more wide-ranging—and more exciting. Poetry, after all, did not welcome the “new prose” that Anderson loved and championed; it was not likely to attract reproof from the vice squad. The Little Review received that barbed honor within its first five years.Anderson first read the opening words of Ulysses in late January 1918. She told Heap, “We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.” Pound agreed. A month earlier, he’d lobbied for The Little Review to take the plunge, writing, “I suppose we’ll damn well be suppressed.… BUT it is damn wellworth it. I see no reason why the nations should sit in darkness merely because Anthony Comstock was horrified at the sight of his grandparents in copulation.” The magazine began serializing Ulysses the same year and continued through December 1920, despite a lukewarm critical reception. (Virginia Woolf called it “an illiterate, underbred book,” while American readers wrote the magazine letters of protest over its “cheap Bowery vileness.”) During the course of that period, four issues were seized and burned for obscenity.Together, Anderson and Heap faced obscenity charges in court in 1921. “This trial,” Morgan writes, “would make Ulysses the most influential literary work of the twentieth century. It would change the very definition of what a book could be.” It’s debatable whether Ulysses required this specific and embarrassing legal incident to take its place in the cultural pantheon, but it was necessary in one sense: The reversal of that decision 12 years later changed the prospects of every novelist that followed.In a New York City courtroom, the floor “worn smooth by millions of Oxford shoes over the last 50 years,” three judges presided, including James J. McInerney. McInerney was a known quantity. In September 1915, he had ruled against Bill Sanger, husband of Margaret, for giving out birth control information. (“The trouble is that many women are too selfish,” he proclaimed during the sentencing hearing.) Anderson’s looks won her a measure of protection. When the time came to read aloud the offending passages from The Little Review, “one of the judges who had fallen asleep woke up, looked at Margaret ‘with a protective paternity,’ and ‘refused to allow the obscenity’ to be read in her presence.”The judges’ thinking in this case grew out of a precedent in English law called the Hicklin test. In Regina v. Hicklin (1868, U.K.), the decision said obscenity was present if any part of the material had a tendency to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” If a section of a book, no matter how it was taken out of context, was seen as likely to “stimulate sexual thoughts in impressionable minds,” the work as a whole was classified as obscene.Judgments about obscenity revolved around the imagined consciousness of the innocent reader—usually, in legal arguments, an adolescent girl. In her memoirs, Anderson writes that the courts considered her “a danger to the minds of young girls”; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice soon leveled the same charge at the publishers of lesbian-forward novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Heap spoke out powerfully about the hypocrisy inherent in this idealization of girls and in the legal challenges leveled at Ulysses. “So the mind of the young girl rules this country?” Heap wrote in The Little Review of December 1920. If that were so, she wondered, why were there no girls in the U.S. Senate? Across America, millions of young girls were caring for their siblings and working for pay. Barely enfranchised yet, they had no true representative in the government.Anderson and Heap’s guilty verdict took “a few minutes,” and each editor was fined $50, about equivalent to $900 today. Seized copies of The Little Review were sent to the Salvation Army, where, Morgan writes, “they were ripped up for recycling by sex workers in reform programs.” Anderson despaired.The fortunes of Ulysses turned sunnier barely a year later. In Paris, Sylvia Beach—another queer woman—published the book to rapturous reviews in 1922. Anderson and Heap separated, with Heap shouldering most of The Little Review. As though following Ulysses, Anderson moved to Paris in 1923 after falling in love with Georgette LeBlanc, then a high-profile French singer. The two would live in impossibly romantic and ramshackle places: a ruined chateau and later a converted lighthouse on the Seine. The Little Review, after being edited largely by Heap for several years, printed its final issue in 1929.In 1933, American publisher Bennett Cerf paid a customs officer to confiscate Ulysses, provoking another trial. On December 6, a federal judge ruled that it was no longer obscene. What had changed? Either the minds of young girls, the law’s perception of its own role regarding the morals of art, or a combination thereof. American culture now embraced the modernists. Their literary reputations had grown, and American readers bought up five-figure print runs quickly. The New York book publishers now made millions, according to Morgan, from selling Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and other Little Review regulars—most of whom had been banned a dozen years previously, and shunned by nearly every press because of the legal risk.Ulysses’s American opponents had equated the novel with pornography. At a time in the United States when sexual purity had become a public health priority (the war had uncovered a silent epidemic of syphilis and gonorrhea raging through American households) as well as a social asset (specifically for young girls), legal decisions framed censorship as a protective measure. Some communities were stricter than others: being “banned in Boston,” which was heavily Roman Catholic, became almost a badge of honor for novelists. Much of Europe had no comparable moral police making publishing decisions. In Anderson’s words, “The Little Review was the first magazine to reassure Europe as to America, and the first to give America the tang of Europe.”In contrast with today’s book-ban disputes, largely driven by political actors and school boards, Anderson and Heap faced censorship from the vice agents and postal inspectors who opened mail and trawled through books. The power of the Comstock Act, the federal postal censorship law that took effect in 1873, was barely beginning to wane. Vice agents like John Saxton Sumner, who kept a close eye on the Review while fruitlessly yearning to be respected by the literary in-crowd, sounded the alarm about writing like Joyce’s that dwelled on sex for its own sake, without a moral message. “It is the Mr. Sumners who have made it [sex] an obscenity,” wrote Heap, as opposed to Joyce and his ilk, “who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function.” Literature jostled with the sex education and birth control movements in the battle for freedom of speech.Anderson and Heap fought for Ulysses because it was “the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have,” in Anderson’s words. The Little Review embraced the novel simply because, as a work of art, it made its own rules. At great cost to themselves, these two editors dared to imagine a society where transgressive literature was a kind of portal to a freer future. They were ahead of their time, and possibly again ahead of ours.
The Supreme Court has enabled many of the Trump administration’s worst abuses over the past 14 months, particularly when it comes to his mass deportation plans. The justices’ shadow docket has largely served as a Pez dispenser for injunctions to stay the most significant lower court rulings against Trump. And while the Roberts court bucked its own deferential tendencies to declare the president’s tariffs to be unlawful last week, some important tests remain on the Federal Reserve and birthright citizenship. But the lower courts have, for the most part, risen to the occasion and understood the gravity of what is happening in this country right now, despite the Supreme Court’s failures. Judge Sunshine Sykes in California struck down the administration’s mandatory-detention policy for immigration-related arrests by ruling that the government had failed to comply with her past orders on the practice, noting that Americans “have expressed deep concerns over unlawful, wanton acts by the executive branch.”Judge Fred Biery in Texas was even more blunt when ordering the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from a federal immigration detention center last month. “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” he wrote in a three-page order. After his signature, he affixed a photo of young Liam being detained by immigration agents and affixed two Bible quotes, Matthew 19:14 (“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’”) and John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”).This is not how federal judges write opinions and orders in normal circumstances. The growing pace with which the federal judiciary is being compelled to speak in such direct, unvarnished terms is a sign of how far the country has drifted from legitimate constitutional government. Take, for instance, the Trump administration’s unconstitutional campaign to punish six Democratic lawmakers for a video they published last November. At the time, the White House and the Pentagon were under intense scrutiny for a series of military strikes in the Caribbean targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats. Many observers have warned that these strikes could violate international law.In the video, the six members of Congress—all of whom had previously served in the military—directly addressed American troops to tell them to “refuse illegal orders” if issued to them. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law, or our Constitution,” they collectively said. “Know that we have your back.” Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the legal code for the U.S. armed forces, soldiers are obligated to not follow illegal orders and face the potential risk of prosecution if they carry them out.The Trump administration’s response was volcanic. Trump himself angrily described the video’s language as “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denounced it as a “politically motivated influence operation” and described the lawmakers as the “Seditious Six.” In January, Hegseth sent a letter to Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who appeared in the video, to formally notify him that he had “engaged in a sustained pattern of public statements that characterized lawful military operations as illegal and counseled members of the Armed Forces to refuse orders related to those operations.”As a result, Hegseth censured Kelly, directed Pentagon officials to determine whether the senator should be reduced in rank—which would, among other things, lower his retirement pay—and warned that he could face potential criminal prosecution if he continued to “engage in conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline.” Kelly responded a few days later by filing a federal lawsuit against Hegseth to challenge the move on multiple grounds, including the First Amendment.It is a gobsmacking notion that the Pentagon could lawfully punish a retired service member for publicly giving a straightforward explanation of the UCMJ, much less one who happens to be a U.S. senator. Judge Richard Leon noted, quite correctly, that it was indisputable that the First Amendment applies more narrowly to American service members in this context than to civilians because of the inherent need to maintain military discipline.“Unfortunately for Secretary Hegseth, no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military,” Leon testily explained. “This Court will not be the first to do so!”Here we have a judge who can not only read the law and the Constitution but who also understands the principles by which they were drafted. Few principles are more bedrock to the American constitutional order than civilian control of the military, as enshrined by the president’s role as commander in chief and Congress’s control over its funding. The proper response to Hegseth’s maneuver is not a law-school symposium or a bloodless explanation—it is unvarnished disgust.Leon noted, when describing the procedural aspects of the case, that the proposed reduction in rank “would, in all likelihood, be a fait accompli!” (The judge used exclamation points on more than a dozen separate occasions in the opinion.) “Secretary Hegseth issued the Letter censuring Senator Kelly,” Leon continued. “The Letter cannot be appealed, and it serves as the sole factual basis for the Retirement Grade Proceeding.” And even if the board reaches a different conclusion, Hegseth retains the power to override it.For that reason, Leon found it ridiculous for Pentagon lawyers to suggest that Kelly first had to go through the proper administrative process before he could bring his case to the courts. “This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” the judge explained. “After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!”The Pentagon also claimed that Kelly’s lawsuit had to be rejected because Congress expressly bound retired service members to the UCMJ. Leon did not dispute that notion but felt obligated to explain basic principles of American constitutionalism to them nonetheless. “Horsefeathers!” he exclaimed, concluding that Congress’s choice “has little bearing on the scope of First Amendment protections for retirees. The First Amendment is a limitation on the power of Congress, not the other way around!”His injunction has the air of a high school principal who just discovered that his students think Florida is in the Himalayas. “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers,” Leon concluded, “Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years.“If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!” he continued. “Hopefully this injunction will in some small way help bring about a course correction in the Defense Department’s approach to these issues.”Other constitutional actors apparently agreed with Leon’s view of the matter. Earlier this month, federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia sought to indict Kelly and his five colleagues for alleged criminal offenses related to the video’s publication. It is unclear precisely what charges were sought. The failure to obtain them is another spectacular and humiliating defeat for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the district, and a significant setback for the Trump administration as it tries to criminalize dissent.Just as importantly, however, it is a reminder of the power of the ordinary American citizen when empaneled as a juror in a court of law. The last 14 months have arguably done more to demonstrate how juries preserve Americans’ liberties than the preceding 14 decades. D.C. became the first to show that juries could be more than a procedural checkbox for vengeful prosecutors, last year, in the case of Sean Dunn, who allegedly threw a Subway sandwich at federal immigration agents in the city in August.In an apparent effort to make an example of him, federal prosecutors first charged Dunn with felony assault of a law enforcement official and touted his arrest on social media. That effort fell apart a few weeks later when the citizens of the nation’s capital, serving as grand jurors, declined to approve a felony indictment against him. Prosecutors then pivoted to charging Dunn with misdemeanor assault, which does not require the approval of a grand jury. They were then foiled by a petit jury of Dunn’s peers that duly acquitted him in November.Since then, the phenomenon of grand jury resistance has only grown. Trump’s high-profile crackdown in D.C. last fall yielded a wave of prosecutions that fell far short of what Washington’s grand jurors thought was justified. Across the Potomac in Virginia, grand jurors declined to bring some charges against Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in September. (A judge later dismissed the rest after prosecutors improperly tried to bypass the grand jury.) In Chicago, where another Trump-led siege faltered after a federal judge blocked the use of the National Guard, grand jurors have torpedoed more than a dozen apparently spurious cases related to immigration enforcement.There could be few greater tributes to the Constitution on the 250th anniversary of this nation’s founding. The Framers greatly valued the jury as an instrument to prevent abusive governance. “We think in America that it is necessary to introduce the people into every department of government as far as they are capable of exercising it; and that this is the only way to ensure a long-continued and honest administration of its powers,” Thomas Jefferson told a French acquaintance in a letter in 1789.The people exist in the executive branch by electing the president, Jefferson explained, and in the legislative branch by choosing their own lawmakers. The average American is not qualified to serve as a judge, he noted, but the jury system is how they make their presence felt in the judicial branch. “Were I called upon to decide whether the people had best be omitted in the Legislative or Judiciary department, I would say it is better to leave them out of the Legislative,” Jefferson argued. “The execution of the laws is more important than the making [of] them.”Speaking for myself, I would not endorse that position unreservedly. But the Framers envisioned both courts and juries as a vital bulwark to liberty, and they are two of the few institutions that have acquitted themselves well—no pun intended—over the last year. It is a grim milestone that our elected branches of government have done the most harm to our constitutional system over the past year, while the branch composed of lifetime appointments and citizens chosen by random lot has done the least. Fortunately, Americans can reshape the legislative branch to meet that standard in a little less than nine months.
During his inaugural address more than 60 years ago, President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation he was about to lead to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” In the decades since, millions of Americans have answered this call by choosing to pursue a career in public service, working in the various departments that make up federal, state, and local government. It has taken just over a year for this administration to take a hacksaw to the federal workforce. After promising to cause federal workers “trauma,” the Trump administration has fired thousands of career civil servants across dozens of agencies. This has hit science agencies especially hard—Science magazine estimates more than 10,000 federal workers with STEM doctoral degrees left the government in the past year, representing a 14 percent cut of workers with a STEM doctorate in the federal workforce. This adds up to more than 100,000 years of experience lost.Prior to this administration, federal workers faced headwinds. According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2022, for workers with a master’s degree or higher, federal wages and benefits were less than what the private sector offered (though bachelor’s degrees are on par and those with no degree are paid more than in the private sector). The CBO report also stated that federal wage growth was lower than increases that were occurring in the private sector in the years preceding 2022. The positives reported—such as job security and the ability to telework—have now all been thrown into disarray. While the cuts the administration has made have been drastic and damaging, they come amid a concerning trend occurring among recent grads of America’s top universities. By and large, America’s top grads are choosing to go into private industry—with finance, consulting, and tech being top picks. At Harvard, polling from 2022 conducted by The Harvard Crimson shows that 58 percent of graduates were set to go into those fields—23 percent in consulting, 18 percent in finance, and 17 percent in technology, respectively (academia made up 9 percent and public service/not-for-profits made up less than 4 percent). This is an increase from 44 percent in a Crimson poll conducted in 2014.Also in 2022, at Brown (my alma mater and present institution), the same percentage of students reported going into those fields (23 percent in technology, 18 percent for consulting, and 17 percent for finance). Those looking to go into scientific research made up 8 percent, while government and public affairs each made up 2 percent. It’s not just private institutions, either. Polling from the Ohio State University from 2023 showed 78 percent of grads indicated they would work in private industry, 13 percent said government, and 8 percent said not-for-profits or private education. The reason for the overwhelming preference for private industry is monetary (the 2014 Crimson poll suggests that most students don’t see themselves in that field 10 years from graduation), but some also say the push to slot graduates into the financial or tech sector is so pervasive that it’s become a default choice. Many young people enter these fields because they perceive they will earn a good enough living that it can buy them more time to figure out what they actually want to do.The Trump administration’s actions in education will only make this problem worse. Take the decimation of National Institutes of Health training programs—these are grants that provide early career researchers and students with necessary funding to conduct studies. These can be used as a launching pad to apply for more grants and slowly build a research lab. Funding for these grants has been reduced dramatically, and some pipelines have been eliminated as a casualty of the administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion. These grants were specifically designed to make researchers more reflective of America, including people of underrepresented races, from low-income backgrounds, and from rural areas. This has its consequences—a recent Boston Globe poll shows that more than two-thirds of 367 scientists who were surveyed said that they recommended their students look outside of academia for a career.I’ve seen this firsthand across my LinkedIn feed. Faced with the worst job market (especially for college grads) since the pandemic, some in public health and former federal workers are pivoting to working in industry-connected lobby and trade groups. I’ve heard from people who advise public health students that many are looking to pivot out of the field or to leverage their skills into insurance or pharmaceuticals. Changes to the federal loans cap for graduate, medical, and law degrees mean that students may feel staying in consulting or finance is a smarter choice, or they may be locked into these careers for longer. The Department of Education has also recommended that graduate public health and nursing degrees be excluded from the professional degree classification, which may have implications for federal loans. All of these are push factors for people to stay in or move to private industry. Federal loans are already burdensome; needing to take private loans could make that financial pressure even worse—if people choose to even pursue these degrees at all.Not-for-profits have also been hit hard by the administration’s unpredictable cuts. Nearly one-third of not-for-profits reported a delay or pause in funding in 2025, while 21 percent reported losing some funding. More than $425 billion was frozen or canceled in grants for organizations working on different issues across federal agencies—from the Department of Health and Human Services to the National Endowment for the Arts. Haphazard cancellations that end up being blocked in court or reversed are little comfort as they leave not-for-profits anxious and less likely to invest in new programs (and new careers). While these cuts have had decimating impacts on different sectors, the government has not saved much money at all. While some private companies have been hit hard—Booz Allen Hamilton, for instance, has had all its Treasury contracts canceled in retaliation for a Trump tax leak—others continue to rake in millions in government contracts. Palantir, for instance, secured close to $1 billion in federal contracts last year. Deloitte has secured $100 million in contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Naturally, defense contractors continue to make up the biggest share.Ultimately, private industry, especially nowadays, serves the interests of its shareholders and owners; it has an overarching directive to maximize profits. This is not to say that private industry does not lead to innovation at all, but ultimately end products that do not serve a profit margin will be abandoned. This takes a real hit on the creativity and public service projects—there will be fewer people in the arts, fewer people in the sciences, and fewer people out there serving their communities Morover, the people in those fields will spend their young and productive years worried about making rent, paying down debt, and keeping the jobs that make this possible. Ultimately, this contributes to a feeling of malaise—as more and more graduates end up isolated, dealing with a world that looks and feels like the same grey slop. With the decline of scientists working for the public good (and funded on the public dime), we will lose out on discoveries that may lead to new drugs, new cures, and new breakthroughs. The future will arrive all the same; it just won’t be Americans building it anymore—or profiting from it.Americans often reminisce about the government of the mid-twentieth century—when it seemed like there was an endless supply of creative thinking: the New Deal programs that paid writers and artists; the public works projects that put people to work in building new infrastructure; the whole-of-government effort to put a man on the moon; the creation of new endowments for humanities, sciences and the arts; among so many other things. The decline of these jobs in society is detrimental to the overall social fabric. If government funding is any guide, the jobs of the future mostly involve the construction of prison camps. Damage is being done to American public service in a short amount of time that will last generations. The country is losing years of talent and potential to the private sector and to other countries. Some of this may not be able to be reversed; the losses will be great. But that does not mean things cannot be rebuilt and built better. Recovery will require a vision and political will perhaps bolder than Project 2025 itself—a revitalization of public service is possible, but only if we are willing to fight for it. It is perhaps time to put the question to a new generation of Democratic leaders: What you can do for your country?
"Twitter has become a sewer of misinformation, with the power to bring about troubling real-world impacts," says Oliver.