"Nobody Cared"

"It is also a grim judgment on the entire political system. The Supreme Court has effectively rendered the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution moot. Republicans are completely in thrall to Trump and unwilling to exercise the kind of patriotism their party showed when leaders of the GOP broke with Richard Nixon over his crimes. Democrats, with some noble exceptions such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have been notably reluctant to make corruption an issue, since it seems to have little political traction."

Jeet Heer at The Nation describes Donald Trump "as perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history."

"We Are Not Fascists, and If You Call Us Fascists, We Will Arrest You"

"Fascist regimes have classic, telltale traits, like vilifying immigrants, adopting patriotic symbolism of their nation's glorious past, embracing a narrow definition of masculinity and family values, and striving for economic and diplomatic self-sufficiency. But just because we also do all of those things does not make us fascists. That the unhinged left insists otherwise is proof that we're really the victims in all of this. Which is why we must apprehend and silence our critics in self-defense."

From Carlos Greaves at McSweeney's.

"Destruction Is So Much Easier Than Construction"

"Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump's assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There's a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it."

At The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash writes that "Americans have 400 days to save their democracy."

"Make America Manifest Destiny Again"

"It's why Trump and his agents respect no legal citizenship lines; some of them have called for the denaturalization and deportation of New York City's Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Trump’s State Department is creating an 'Office of Remigration,' employing a term favored by extremists who call for, as Mother Jones puts it, 'the forcible repatriation or mass expulsion of non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.' And Trump wants the power to exile by personal fiat: 'We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time. . . many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too.' Who is deciding, without due process, who the 'bad people' are?"

Douglas Sackman at The Bulwark argues that racial nationalism "grows darkly at the heart of MAGA."

"A Liberty That Would Be Easily Understood by the Scots-Irish of Appalachia but Would Perplex the Puritans of New England"

"California's convoluted policies toward drugs and mental illness have combined to exacerbate its colossal homelessness problem, setting it apart, once again, from progressive Yankee states. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, followed by Oregon, whose settlement history and politics are very similar to those of Northern California. By contrast, New York City, whose upstate region was settled by Yankees, has the third lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness in America. Its success in bringing its homeless population indoors is thanks to its 'right to shelter' law—a classic top-down Yankee solution to an urgent social problem. Neither California nor Oregon has such a law."

Leighton Woodhouse at UnHerd claims that California's political problems stem from the influence of two groups from back East.

"This Is What We Are, and What We Are Going to Be"

"The more banal fallout of this all is that America remains a nation split between red and blue, with neither party gaining a decisive advantage. Republicans cannot triangulate or realign the electorate in such a manner to doom the Democrats to irrelevancy. Democrats can't seem to excite voters enough to revive the promise of an Obama-esque landslide. Democrats have the edge to flip the House next year, while Republicans should be the favorites to retain Senate control. The 2028 race is probably going to be a closely divided slog, no matter whom the major parties nominate."

Ross Barkan at New York looks at the state of American politics, six months into Donald Trump's second term.

As does Andrew Sullivan at The Weekly Dish. 

"To Put Down Roots and Then Oppose New Development"

"Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. 'We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,' Gyourko told me. 'That clearly isn't the case.'"

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic writes that "[t]he Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them.

Trump U

Various writers discuss Donald Trump's attacks on higher education:

Jonathan V. Last does so at The Bulwark.

As Owen Jones does at The Guardian.

As Jonathan Chait, Edith Olmsted, Jonathan W. Gray, and Felipe De La Hoz do at The New Republic.

"Blame Gerald Ford"

"Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues."

Franklin Foer at The Atlantic writes that the "road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon."

"Civil Servants Are Not America's Enemies"

"Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. The tasks these 2.2 million employees perform are often uncontroversial; the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest employers, and 70 percent of the civil service works in defense and security-related agencies. Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too."

Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic defends the civil service from Donald Trump.

Steven Levitsky describes the rise of "competitive authoritarianism."

And Jonathan Chait writes that "bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump."

"The Growing Obsolescence of the Older Ideal of the Nuclear Family "

"Like the cultural innovations of the Sixties youth, the current trends away from family and fertility and toward gender fluidity are likely to endure in some form. They are rooted, for the most part, in underlying social and economic changes that politics and policy cannot easily reverse. They are not confined to the United States but common in other advanced capitalist countries."

John Judis at The Liberal Patriot describes the 1960s and 2010s as "two periods in modern American history where many of the young have adopted distinctive and effective political and cultural outlooks."

And Aria Bendix at NBC News explains "[w]hy abortions rose after Roe was overturned."

"Rooted in the Blood of More Than 700,000 Americans Who Died in the Civil War"

"Section 1's origins lie deep in our past. It is rooted in the petitions of African Americans during and after the American Revolution that demanded freedom and natural rights for their service to the patriot cause. It stems from many ideas and strategies of the British and American abolition movements. It echoes Thomas Jefferson's inclusion of equality among 'these truths' in the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's use of the same word in the Gettysburg Address, as well as his full-throated embrace of immigration well before the Civil War. Its most direct and powerful harbinger is the emancipation of nearly 4 million slaves in the midst of the war. Without that greatest transformation in American history, there would be no Fourteenth Amendment—no birthright citizenship and no equal-protection clause either, a codification just as sacred."

David W. Blight at The Atlantic responds to Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship.

"That Retreat Is Shortsighted and, Ultimately, Dangerous"

"Free speech as a value has historically been the domain of the American left: In the 1950s, its archenemy was Republican senator Joseph McCarthy; Black civil-rights leaders saw it as essential to the success of their movement; and in 1988, Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush tarred his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a 'card-carrying member of the ACLU.' But over the past ten years, Donald Trump and other right-wing provocateurs have co-opted free-speech values to advance an agenda often at odds with liberalism and social justice (see Elon Musk's X), while Democrats, progressives, and, arguably, the ACLU have retreated from the ideal that free speech needs to be protected regardless of the viewpoint being expressed."

Jordan Heller at New York discusses if "there is truth in the depiction of the ACLU of the Trump era as prioritizing social-justice work over the viewpoint-neutral defense of civil liberties."

"A Post-Constitutional Moment"

"Instead, the special counsel's report delivers a confession of the helplessness of the U.S. government. Smith asserts that there was sufficient evidence to convict Trump of serious crimes—and then declares the constitutional system powerless to act: The criminal is now the president-elect; therefore, his crime cannot be punished."

David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to the release of "Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election."

"To Restore a Fundamental Principle of Fairness to Our Economy"

"But the FTC's decision to stop enforcing it decades ago triggered a seismic shift in America. It gave massive chains like Walmart free rein to squeeze suppliers for unfair discounts. Walmart's expansion went unchecked; manufacturers consolidated and shuttered factories; jobs vanished; and thousands of small businesses folded, leaving hollowed-out Main Streets and food deserts in their wake. Outside of the collapse of US manufacturing, few economic forces have done as much damage to the American landscape in the past 50 years."

Ron Knox at The Nation discusses a revival of the Robinson-Patman Act.

"The Defendant Is Too Popular?"

"I've been known to dabble in satire, but I'm deadly serious here, just as I was last June when I recommended that Trump serve six months at Rikers (which is where New York State sends felons tried in New York City and sentenced to less than one year). Now, of course, the United States government can no longer spare Trump for six months. But it can still spare him for one week. Rikers was good enough for Trump's former chief financial adviser Alan Weisselberg, age 77, who last spring booked himself three months there after perjuring himself on Trump's behalf (in an unrelated civil fraud case, now under appeal, in which Trump was fined $355 million). Rikers should be good enough for Trump, too."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic writes: "Jail Trump for One Week."

"How Did Trump Get Away With It When Nixon Didn't?"

"Trump also bent administration rules to obtain a top security clearance for his son-in-law, who served as his unofficial secretary of state and went on to negotiate for himself a highly unusual $2 billion investment deal with Saudi state funds just months after the administration ended. Any one of these incidents would have been an administration-shaking event in the 1970s or '80s, even in the '90s or early 2000s. The old rules were sloughed off in the 2010s, and by the 2020s were barely remembered."

David Frum at The Atlantic marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation.

"The Real Intent Is to Privilege a Particular Expression of Christianity"

"'It's significant that the Louisiana law uses the same text created for "The Ten Commandments" movie promotions by the Fraternal Order of Eagles and Paramount Pictures because it reminds us that this text isn't one found in any Bible and isn't one used by any religious faith,' Kruse said via email. 'Instead, it's a text that was crafted by secular political actors in the 1950s for their own ends.'"

Holly Meyer and Peter Smith at the Associated Press discuss Louisiana's H.B. 71.

"Eternal Exposure Is the Price of Enlightenment"

"And then there's the ever-present question conveniently ignored by anti-free-speech academics: Who is on the committee that decides what new speech restrictions to impose and how to define them? Do we trust the same Republican state legislatures or local school boards that are already banning books and prohibiting the teaching of The 1619 Project and critical race theory? It's one thing to write law review articles and books urging new limitations on offensive and hateful speech. It's a far different matter to empower government authorities at federal, state, and local levels, with civil, criminal, and administrative enforcement powers, or college administrators (with or without faculty input) with the power to grant, deny, or revoke tenure, to decide what ideas can be spoken, written, or taught."

Stephen Rohde at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Robert Corn-Revere's The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder.

"They Are the Ones Driving San Francisco's Political Vibe Shift"

"Whether it's the Chinese-Americans and other parents who were upset at the school board for shutting down programs for high achievers, or the young professionals starting families who just want to be able to afford somewhere to live, or the working-class residents of the Tenderloin who are sick of their neighborhood getting turned into a drug-filled porta potty, it's liberals who are sick of the bullshit and just want to say 'Yes We Can to opportunity and prosperity' for their families and their communities."

Tim Miller at The Bulwark describes the "Revenge of the Obama Democrats."