No, I’m not going to talk about the ICE shootings in Minnesota and Oregon. They’re not the first, there will be more, and I’ve been preparing you for this since 2020. It’s horrible, but I beg you not to let it affect your actions. I do beg instead for you to look at this as a further data point that our system of government under law as we knew it is dead.

I’ve tried to avoid getting caught in the inanity of Trump foreign policy, because that’s not where positive change is going to come from for us – and on top of that, I was traveling as all this Venezuela meshugas was happening. But a devoted reader said on Bluesky they couldn’t wait to hear my thoughts on it, so I’m giving this to y’all out of respect to my fanbase. I also play covers!

The tl;dr helpfully comes from a post by former Congressman Adam Kinzinger:

I mean, militarily, sure, this was a hell of an op. You gotta be impressed. It has to remind the Russians that they tried this exact same kind of decapitation strike against Zelenskyy in Kyiv at the beginning of their 2022 Ukraine offensive, only to have their most elite operators annihilated by third-string Ukrainian reservists. This will give China pause, too: this amazing success was achieved against a Venezuelan air defense system patterned on their own, and while theirs almost certainly is better than Venezuela’s, they’ll need time to study just what happened. My bigger concern is that we may have shown off a lot of capabilities here that we should have kept secret rather than waste on this silly ego trip of a mission.

Now, as for the rest of the pony sketch… I didn’t spend 20 years in the State Department's shop for conflict stabilization and reconstruction operations to not have some thoughts on this.. I now understand why they broke us up: there’s no point having people around who will tell you the best way to do something when your entire intent is ill. It would be like Hitler assembling teams of skilled civil administrators to manage the Jewish-inhabited areas of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine; competent civil administration had no relevance to his plans for the Jews.

I often ask my grad students how different they think modern stabilization efforts are from old-school colonialism (answer: not as different as they’d like, but that’s not as bad as they think), but what Trump envisions for Venezuela is something totally different: for all their misdeeds, colonialists believed there was a core “civilizing” goodness to their mission that would improve things for their subjects somehow, and indeed colonialism’s legacy is not at all black or white.

What Trump is doing in Venezuela is neither a stability operation nor colonialism: it’s just a mafia shakedown. It’s no different from Donnie Fat-Fingers murdering the owner of an ice cream shop who wouldn’t pay him enough protection, and then telling the owner’s family to pay up, or we’ll come back for someone else. You can see this really clearly through three features:

• No Invasion/Occupation: Donnie Nine-Fingers doesn’t kill an ice cream store owner and then put on an apron and start scooping cones for smiling kids himself! If he wanted to work, he’d go get a real job! Trump just wants the money he thinks oil access will get him, and he wants people to be afraid, and I think he’s got a very good sense that no one in America wants to do an Operation Venezuelan Freedom this soon after Iraq and Afghanistan;

• “It’s not personal; it’s just business:” Of course, you could argue that Nicolas Maduro hardly is the innocent owner of an ice cream shop. He’s more like the long-time local capo who just lost a turf war with Don Trump, who’s asserting firmer control over “his” new territory. The way Trump is jilting the legitimate Venezuelan opposition, including the person we were calling “The President,” in favor of working with Maduro’s old team also is very Mob-like. Hoods trust fellow hoods more than they trust non-criminals, because they understand each other, and share incomprehension and contempt for people who don’t break laws, even when they could get away with it. Leaders who might get a twinge of democratic conscience won’t be able to do all Trump wants them to, no matter how indebted to him they are. Lower-level mobsters afraid of being killed or snatched themselves are much more reliable partners to keep a shakedown going, as long as they get their cut.

Of course (spoiler alert!) the spoiler for The Godfather is when Michael says to Tom Hagen, “Don’t let anybody kid you, it’s all personal, every bit of business.” The personal part of this is that Maria Corina Machado got the Nobel, Trump didn’t, and the Mad King is jealous.

Take the Money and Run: Trump bleats on Truth Social that Venezuela is giving him 30-50 million barrels of oil immediately to sell on the open market, and that Trump will personally control the proceeds and decide how to spend them “to the benefit of Venezuela and the United States!” This is yet another utterly lawless slush fund for Trump.

Unfortunately, instead of Don Vito Corleone, we have Donald Trump, who in his own way is a worse Mafiosi than even Putin or Xi. It’s funny to compare Trump to Vito’s failson Fredo, but that’s unfair to Fredo; Fredo means well. He’s trying to do good things for The Family, he’s just incompetent. Xi and Putin are in the Corleone mold – we can argue which Corleone they resemble (turns out Putin is Fredo, utterly failing at the venture he promised Xi and Trump would be easy), but they believe they are working on lasting legacies for their countries, as Don Vito and Michael both tried to do for their family.

Trump doesn’t really believe in legacies, he just believes in himself. As a malignant narcissist, he can’t really imagine a world beyond him or after him. That might be changing a bit as he’s clearly facing his own mortality, but his deteriorating faculties just make it harder for him to think about futures. He’s a Louis XIV guy not only for “l’etat, c’est moi,” but also for “apres moi, le deluge.” This may seem strange considering he puts his name on lots of physical objects that will outlive him, but he’s doing that for his immediate ego gratification and profit today, because he can look at them and be in them; that’s why you see Trump buildings, but no Trump foundations or institutes or scholarships.

Addenda

Two other small, related thoughts before I return to trying to not be distracted by him:

• Stephen Miller being assigned a role on Venezuela policy reflects a number of disturbing things:

  • first, how small Trump’s trusted circle really is;

  • second, how declaring Venezuela “liberated” will allow the regime to intensify roundups and deportations of Venezuelans in the U.S.;

  • third, as we implement the “Donroe Doctrine” more and more across the Americas, including using the Army’s new “Western Hemisphere Command,” we’re likely to see the military and paramilitary law enforcement used interchangeably across the hemisphere, where anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, and whoever resists our oil companies in Venezuela will be treated as the same threat to be addressed with the same range of capabilities.

• Triumphal (Trumphal?) Arch: you’ve certainly heard him talking about this project, putting a large arch modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of a large circle of land that marks the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery from DC as one crosses the Potomac. It’s dumb and corrupt just like the ballroom or the “Trump-Kennedy” Center, but it’s very important in one respect I’m not even sure Trump’s senile and narcissistic mind can comprehend: he may only know it subconsciously, but he’s building his tomb. Even if he can’t fully process that, the people around him certainly have, as they anticipate the odds on him living through his term.

I’ll try to be back soonest with more proactive thoughts on our situation. Meanwhile, keep tabs on me via Substack or Bluesky, and feel free to chat anytime!

“Everyone has their own rebellion” is a phrase from season one of Andor, as Cassian meets Vel Sartha, the leader of a rebel cell planning one of the first major strikes against the Empire. A disaffected aristocrat herself, Vel is trying to explain to Cassian how her different teammates came to the Rebellion: two ex-Imperials disgusted by the regime, a criminal, an idealist, and a girl who lost her whole family in an Imperial atrocity. People of very different backgrounds, united only by their determination to live under something other than the Empire, even if the something is unclear, even undiscussed.

New Life, New Flag

As of now, I’m officially retired from the U.S. Government, and I’m officially in rebellion. You should be too, but your reasons don’t have to be the same as mine.

You’ve probably noticed the changed graphics. When I adopted the French Resistance’s legendary Cross of Lorraine motif back in 2020, it made sense to me for someone still working in Government. It blended in with all the “Resistance” imagery of the First Trump Era, and it made particular sense because, like the WWII resistance movements in Europe, I ultimately was trying to communicate to, and depending on, outside liberators (that was you, the voters. Thanks!) to save me from the Trumpist officials occupying my Department. That wasn’t something I was in any position to do, by myself or in some kind of “Deep State Coup,” which was a fabrication.

Indeed, “resistance” to bad and/or illegal ideas was all I could offer legitimately under my oath of office, which you should have wanted and expected me to follow. Also like most of the Free French, I was no revolutionary; I wanted the occupier out, but had no particular views on what America’s future government should look like, just that it shouldn’t include Trumpists.

Unfortunately, it turns out we kicked the Nazis out by electing the Vichy French to lead us. I’m sure I’ll come back to that, but right now there’s not much point in dwelling on the complete failure of the Biden/Harris Administration to take on the Trumpist insurrection they faced. We’re where we are now, and that’s what matters.

The new graphic represents two things: obviously, my love of Star Wars. More deeply, around July 4^th I found myself increasingly bothered seeing the plain old American Flag flying. As a longtime DC resident, I was accustomed—didn’t even think about it—to not seeing my home represented in those 50 stars. But it meant something totally different to not only not be on the flag, but also have armed troops occupying my city. I could tolerate one, but not both.

I have three American flags in my house. One was on my veteran father-in-law’s casket at his funeral. One flew over Embassy Baghdad and was given to my wife for her service there at the most violent point in the war. The third was given to me after flying over my base in Ghazni, Afghanistan. I’ve earned the right to my own feelings about the flag. I treasure all of them; I’ll fly none of them. Their meaning to me is historical and personal, but no longer patriotic.

A Rebel Alliance symbol also matters now because “rebellion” is where we are now. All the way back in February 2020, I wrote a piece called “Restoration, Reformation, or Revolution?” I argued that “Restoration” always was a losing bet because time doesn’t go backwards, and problems in the past are the source of most problems of the present.

But the balance between “Reformation” and “Revolution” is really hard to strike, given that reformation is incremental and may not address core grievances, but revolutions have a risk of spinning out of control and ending in places far away from what their instigators hoped for.

Unfortunately, Biden aimed for “Restoration”—and I actually had a meeting with one of his top homeland security people in early 2021, and he blew me off when I told him they needed to act as if they were dealing with an incipient insurgency that saw January 6 as a beginning, not an ending.

This leaves us with terrible choices:

• We live under authoritarianism for a generation or three;

• We get new, better leaders in office who try to hold on to some respectable standards as Biden did, but eventually get voted out as will happen, and the new proto-authoritarians will drop the standards again, and our next democratic leader will try to hold those standards… and we take a gentle slope to authoritarianism; or

• Our small-d democratic leader comes in, vows to use every Trumpist tool against them, and we slide straight down a slope of competitive authoritarianism where we vie for the chance to persecute each other or devolve into civil war.

Or… we regain power, we have a hard reckoning with the would-be genocidaires of Donald the Hutt’s shabby regime, and we say “Enough. This system isn’t working for any of us. We need to agree on a new one.” That is a revolution. As Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation would put it, that’s a “peaceful revolution, if the [other side] lets it be.”

I still worry a lot about Revolution, because it’s dangerous and I don’t know where it ends. But our “constitutional republic” has failed us well beyond the point where we can expect “Reform” to improve things. The system we grew up in failed to protect us from authoritarianism; so we accept authoritarianism, or we make something new.

Thomas Paine made a reference in The Crisis to passing a Tory innkeeper one night during the 1776 New Jersey Campaign, and hearing him say while holding his young child, “I hate to see this happening in my day.” To paraphrase Paine’s indignant response, what parent prefers to push a crisis to their child or grandchild rather than face it squarely when it comes?

Thus the Galactic Rebellion. That’s the mindset we need now. We need to abandon what makes us comfortable if we’re going to advance. I’d rather move to something unknown than settle for what we have now—and I reject this status quo entirely as a future to leave to my kids and grandkids without some kind of a fight.

Constitutional Widower

I’ve taken two oaths in my life. The first was in 1999, when I joined the Foreign Service and vowed to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The second was in 2002, when I swore to love, honor, and cherish my More Stable Spouse. The first is dissolved; the second going strong.

Unlike my marriage, which is supposed to end with the death of one of us, it always was taken for granted my tie to the Constitution would end in a divorce someday. It didn’t expect me to die in its service, even though that certainly was a possibility both of us acknowledged. In theory, in a few more years, we’d have had an amicable divorce, with mutual best wishes for our future endeavors—the Constitution even would keep paying me alimony of a sort, via retirement. We’d meet for brunch and holidays with our kids.

That’s not what my involuntary retirement feels like. For me, this is more like feeling that my first love died. I’m not the amicable divorcee, I’m a widower. Worse than that, my first love didn’t die of natural causes: it was murdered.

I believe Donald Trump bludgeoned my first love into a coma on January 6, 2021, when he attempted to override the Constitution to maintain office via a violent insurrection. My love struggled on in the hospital for four years, and might have recovered from the attack, if not for the gross malpractice of its attending physicians, Drs. Biden and Garland. Finally, in 2024 a “death panel” of nine judges euthanized my first love by ruling an insurrectionist could be president and commit crimes with impunity, despite the Constitution clearly saying the exact opposite.

With my Constitution dead and buried, we’ve entered the “state of nature” Thomas Hobbes warned us about. We live with no rule of law, no government, no democracy, simply the whim of the monarch and what society we can build around us in opposition to him.

As one of several million grieving constitutional spouses, I need two things. First, I need to find myself a new constitution to commit to. This one may be dead, but I have a right to seek out another as any widower does, and like with any lost love, I have no obligation to be bound to the qualities of the first. My children also need a constitution to live their lives with as much as they’d need a parent, and I owe it to them to seek one out. A new constitution inherently is a revolutionary prospect, so revolution it is.

But isn’t the lesson of Vel’s team in Andor that it’s enough to be united against Trump? Isn’t imagining my own idea of the More Stable Union a distraction from the immediate crisis, and potentially an obstacle to negotiating alliances with partners who have other visions for a post-Trump America?

Absolutely not! It’s very important to have a vision of what you’re risking “life, fortune, and sacred honor” for—and don’t kid yourself for a moment, that’s the level of risk we’re at. You need a vision a) so it can motivate you; b) warn you off actions that might feel gratifying but are harmful in the long-term, and c) so that as we enter that post-Trump era together, we know what our negotiating flexibilities are—what part of our visions we must demand versus those we can trade with other anti-Trumpists who don’t share all our views.

Star Wars is in fact the best example of this need. All of the Star Wars media set after the Emperor’s death in Return of the Jedi—The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, the Sequel Trilogy—shows a galactic government that basically tries to muddle through with the same Imperial government, liberalized, with the old Senate in control and Luke recreating a monastic Jedi Order. You know, the system we watched fail colossally in the Prequel Trilogy and The Clone Wars animated series! Great job, Rebel Leaders!

I heard Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy (blessed be his name) speak exactly to this on a podcast. He specifically avoided having characters talk about post-Imperial government a) because the canon showed that would be pointless given what actually happens, and b) because the different options in a vast, multi-species galaxy are so varied the show would have gotten bogged down in such discussions. The closest he gets is when Luthen Rael and Saw Gerrera discuss different Rebel groups they know, and refer to “Galaxy Partitionists,” “Human Supremacists,” and several other terms the writers just made up and didn’t bother fleshing out. For both Star Wars continuity and narrative purposes, Gilroy made the right call. It’s not so smart in real revolutions.

Now that I’m out of government, I may talk more directly about some of my past experiences. Suffice to say here, I’ve witnessed three revolutions: Kosovo, Afghanistan (believe me, what we and the Afghan government were trying to do in Afghanistan was revolutionary), and Syria. Kosovo’s rebels had a unifying goal; Afghanistan’s didn’t; Syria’s only got somewhere via massive attrition after a devastating decade. Revolutions that unify only around mutual antipathy towards the oppressor have a nasty tendency to fall into infighting after victory—and that infighting can prove deadlier than the oppressor’s overthrow, as the French Revolution did.

I’m certain events will continue to transpire that will force me to talk about the here and now, but for the next several editions I’m going to try my damnedest to sketch out a vision of victory: not just the defeat of Trump and Trumpism; not just a desirable policy platform for the 2026 and ’28 campaigns that does nothing to halt our systemic decay; but a really revolutionary degree of change—a “New Birth of Freedom,” to be really immodest about it. I promise you that if Lincoln could run the Civil War while envisioning the ideas of the Gettysburg Address, his Second Inaugural, and the Reconstruction Amendments, we can talk revolutionary strategy without tripping over our 2026 election campaigns and our everyday acts of resistance.

I wish all of you the very best for what is going to be a difficult and dangerous year. Please keep in touch with me via the Substack App or Bluesky.

Words fail to express my sorrow for the two West Virginia National Guard soldiers clinging to life—as of when I type this Wednesday night/Thursday morning—after the attack on them yesterday just blocks from the White House, a neighborhood I pass through routinely. Seeing American troops killed or grievously injured on dubious missions sadly isn’t new to me, but it doesn’t get better. I can feel my heart rate accelerating as I type this.

But what’s really raising my blood pressure is the certain knowledge that this is the near-perfect culmination of American Sultan Trump’s intentions and plans when he sent the National Guard into the District of Columbia in the first place. Trump wanted Guardsmen killed so that he’d have stronger justification for even stronger repressive measures, which is exactly what we’ll see. He also wants to see us retreat from our protest and resistance, out of “respect” or fear of escalation. I’m terrified he’ll get both. By the way, this is the first time in MSU history I’ve both bolded and italicized something, so please indulge me and read it a second time.

The truly perfect incident for him would have been an attack by an unattractive purple-haired transgendered white Mamdani-loving college graduate wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and a Che Guevara t-shirt whom he could characterize as “Antifa,” and who was killed and unable to testify at a future trial. He got his second-best choice, but it’s more than enough for him.

I can’t help but understand the motivations of a 29-year-old CIA paramilitary-trained Afghan who came to the U.S. in 2021 (which they’ll blame on Biden) and received asylum just this year (when they’ll ignore Trump is President). These were the guys who stayed to the bitter end to cover our evacuation flights, and often had to make their own ways out. His sense of betrayal at our treatment of his people is as understandable as his response is deplorable. But it should be obvious the people who will suffer most for his crime are his fellow Afghans in America and other immigrants, not other American soldiers. He’s perfectly justified ICE ramping up the brutality of their attacks on immigrants, because now they can point to his example as justification for their heightened “preemptive self-defense” aggression. The blood will flow. Stephen Miller is gleeful.

Already the Sultanate is calling for 500 more troops to be sent to DC—as if that will make DC safer! This is a textbook case of how authoritarians work: create the crisis, then respond to the crisis you created with more general repression. This attacker obviously only crossed a continent to attack soldiers because the soldiers were here. 500 more soldiers here is merely 500 more targets, not 500 people making the city safer from attacks that only happen due to their presence. Everyone in DC will be safer if the soldiers stay home, and the soldiers will be safer still.

This also comes just when the Sultanate is trying so hard to brand as the “Seditious Six” six war veterans who recorded a video reminding military personnel they are obliged to refuse to follow illegal orders. Recording a video saying “it’s illegal to do illegal things” is right up there with recording a video reading the Bill of Rights out loud on the list of “things that definitely are not sedition.”

On Tuesday, I was joking this was all an in-kind contribution to a Mark Kelly 2028 presidential campaign. Now, this attack has given the Sultanate the perfect moment to say that any criticism of military actions, even illegal ones, encourages violence against the military—even though it’s obvious an Afghan living in Washington state didn’t just decide to cross the continent to shoot some soldiers because six legislators stated a truism.

This attack also places non-violent resisters to the Sultanate in even greater danger. I have approached Guardsmen in DC several times: each time, I’ve spotted one sporting a “combat patch”—the patch of a unit worn on the right shoulder to signify the wearer served with that unit for at least 30 days in a combat zone (their normal “unit I’m assigned to” patch is on their left sleeve). I’ll approach that one, always a more senior sergeant—troops without combat patches are kids who wouldn’t relate to me, and who could get in real trouble with their leadership if they took my words too seriously, and I haven’t seen an officer on the street. I’ll ask about their deployment, talk about my own, and in a very friendly, casual manner say, “I’ve been there. Your being here now doesn’t feel like being on patrol with you, it feels like being occupied by you, even if you don’t mean it that way. My community isn’t safer with you here. The people who sent you here are hoping something bad happens to you, so that bad things will happen to us.”

Obviously no one has replied, “My God, you’re right!” and deserted for home that night (which I wouldn’t want, because I don’t want anyone getting court-martialed, at least not yet), but no one’s told me to go to hell either. All I was trying to do—and I’m a pretty persuasive guy if I say so myself—is seed a bit of doubt in the guys who’d be the ones giving orders to open fire if and when it comes to that. In the past few weeks, I’ve even been talking with other war veterans in DC about making this a bigger effort to reach more Guardsmen.

This attack makes this kind of civil engagement just that much harder. Now Guardsmen first have to decide whether we who are approaching them are a threat, which makes this more dangerous for us than it was a day ago. Then, they have to decide to listen to us and believe we’re not part of a group that wishes harm on them, or a diversion for an ambush, which is even worse considering the people who wish harm on them in fact are the people who sent them to DC in the first place!

The entire concept of “civil resistance”—and the reason it’s fundamentally incompatible with “armed resistance”—is that you are seeking to persuade the people who influence or control the means of violence that it’s better to support you than to support the rulers. This is very hard to do when they’re being attacked, which is why civil resistance experts refer to violence as a “contaminant” of a movement, an act of self-sabotage.

There are theoretical, hypothetical circumstances where violent resistance is the only feasible alternative, but the United States in November 2025 still is very far from that.

Just as with the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Sultan’s loyalists will say this attack means any protest against Sultan Donald is inherently disloyal, unpatriotic, and seditious. Worse, there are so-called “opponents” of Trump who will agree. They could not be more wrong. This attack heightens the need for continued non-violent resistance. The vital point is that the Guard’s very presence in DC is illegal, a court of law even said so just a few days ago, and if those Guardsmen never had been sent here, they’d be home with their families in West Virginia enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, and this Afghan attacker would be back on the Pacific coast a continent away doing—whatever he was doing. Sadly, that court gave the Administration a stay to appeal.

Meanwhile, as two young soldiers fight for life in a hospital mere blocks from the White House, the President who lawlessly ordered them to DC on his whim has flown to Mar-a-Lago. The King does not fret the sacrifice of a few pawns when they advance his plans.

My sign at the last No Kings protest read, “No Kings, No Redcoats.” My sadness at what’s happened to these soldiers does nothing to change the substance of my message. In the context of Ken Burns’s “The American Revolution” documentary, I feel like an American “provincial” veteran of the French and Indian War: those “Redcoats” were my friends and comrades-at-arms; I wish with all my heart they still could be, and they could. I’d love to buy one a beer tonight, or take some on a Smithsonian tour. But they’re following orders that make that impossible for me.

To accede to their presence and the demands of the rulers who sent them here is to surrender the very idea of our social contract that motivated me to serve alongside them in the first place. They can go home and still share our republic with me; I cannot. JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and other Great Replacement adherents share my exact view from the reverse perspective. I doubt those two soldiers in the hospital had much of an opinion either way.

I’m not giving up my sign for misguided fear it’s in “poor taste” to identify National Guardsmen from outside DC as “Redcoats” just because some of them got hurt in an illegal mission they shouldn’t have been on, in exactly the manner their “commander-in-chief” hoped for. That’s between them and their chain of command that deliberately planned for this, not me.

What happened this Wednesday in DC is a defeat for the effort to build a better American democracy peacefully. It should not affect the fundamental approach of our campaign, and it cannot affect our resolve. This Thanksgiving, be thankful for our commitment to democracy, and give a moment of thought for those soldiers and their families.

Since 2020, the premise of More Stable Union has been that Trump won’t leave office peacefully, and that he can’t accept lame duck status because of his pathological need to be the center of attention. Obviously I was proven right in 2021, but there’s no question Trump has lost a step in the past month. Whether it’s his health or disappointing elections or Epstein Epstein Epstein, he’s showing signs of recognizing his political and/or biological mortality. So is it time for a duck-sized crutch?

I’m going to stand by my assessment. He’s a little down. It’ll pass, both because of who he is and because of who’s around him.

As Trump’s niece (and clinical psychologist) Mary Trump observes, Trump isn’t just a narcissist, he’s a nihilist. As Mary puts it, Trump’s father/Mary’s grandfather, Fred Trump, was a narcissist too, but he thought in terms of his role in building a Trump Legacy—he groomed Donald to carry that legacy forward, and it was a disastrous mistake. As a nihilist, Donald isn’t able to imagine or care about legacies, or anything after him. Trump doesn’t know anything more about Louis XIV than a gaudy furniture style, but he’d totally agree with the idea of “apres moi, le deluge.” Faced with political and biological mortality, Trump will become more and more self-destructive, and that’s bad for all of us. He won’t be a Lame Duck; he’ll be a Rabid Duck.

This will be orders of magnitude worsened by the people Trump has around him, whose sole shared talent is an uncanny ability to combine criminality of both the most conscience-shocking sort with that of the most comically venal. Count on Steve Bannon always to say the quiet part out loud: these people know if they lose power, they’re going to prison. Eyeing each other around the cabinet table like capos at a mafia summit, they judge that no one among them (except, perhaps, themselves) has what it takes to prevail in a free and fair election barring an unspeakable (and entirely possible) Democratic screwup.

Led by a nihilist who’ll drag them all down if they betray him (as just happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene), their best bet for survival literally is to “ride or die” with Trump, and hope they can create enough confusion in 2028 that the security organs of the state will continue to obey them into 2029, when Trump or whichever of them is left standing swears in before a parade of brown-shirted ICE agents, with drones hovering overhead and concertina wire around the National Mall. Hopefully the wind will blow the smoke and tear gas into the event.

The Shutdown

Watching Ken Burns’s outstanding documentary, “The American Revolution,” I couldn’t help but be struck by the Trenton/Princeton campaign of the winter of 1776-77. It’s widely considered a brilliant military feat, but it’s pretty clear that for George Washington it was more an expression of desperation—and a determination to go down fighting—than a considered work of genius.

From the late start crossing the Delaware, to landing well after midnight, to marching through a snowstorm over nine miles and not arriving at Trenton until after daybreak, to two of the three Rebel columns failing to even manage the crossing at all, Washington made an insane gamble, and it paid off handsomely. Even more remarkably, Washington was able to make almost the same successful move against the British at Princeton, just a week later, inflicting more damage to the British Army, effectively liberating New Jersey of British occupation, and getting his army away cleanly to safe winter quarters when he realized he’d pushed his luck far enough.

I wouldn’t dream of putting Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the same category as George Washington and Henry Knox—we should wish!—but I would put the shutdown in the same category as the Trenton/Princeton campaign: it was ill-considered, rash, uncertain what it could accomplish, born more of desperation than strategy—and paid off better than its instigators expected or deserved. For all the frustration some people have had about whether or not the Democrats should have ended it, I find myself asking more whether they should have started it. After all, that’s really going to be the most relevant question if and when we have to think about doing it again.

My analysis is that it was a bad idea, and likely not worth repeating, unless the goal is to stretch it out until Senate Republicans kill off the detestable filibuster to pass the budget. Setting conditionality around Obamacare subsidies was a foolish choice; fifteen years in, it should be pretty obvious Republicans have no problem immiserating their own constituents as long as it sticks it to the Libs and their hated Kenyan Muslim. To be fair, a lot of their constituents also seem to enjoy misery for that cause. So Dems launched a shutdown for a hopeless goal they’d have to climb down over eventually, as they did. That’s not smart.

Moreover, the real problem with this idea is that the budget hardly looks better if you put the Obamacare subsidies back in! You’re still funding ICE attacks, war crimes in the Caribbean, massive tax cuts, impoverishing cuts to social services, betrayal of Ukraine, and the rest. Rather than standing against this monstrosity of a bill at all costs, Dems now own a piece of it.

And of course I’m hardly the first person to point out that the federal budget is an uneven battleground for Democrats, because we want government to work and do things for people, and the Republicans don’t care. It’s not just like taking someone hostage to try to escape an armed robbery, it’s like taking your own loved one hostage to escape a bunch of armed robbers. Even if they believe you’re not bluffing that you’d hurt them (and you’re bluffing!), they don’t care.

And yet… I think we won? Just a battle, not a war, but a battle nevertheless. How was this a victory?

It Was a Fight: the Base, the Grassroots, the Rank-and-File—whatever you call them, they were (and still are) scared, angry, and poorer than they were a year ago. At a time when Trump and his goons are kidnapping people off streets and bulldozing The People’s House, they desperately needed to see their leadership fight for something, anything. Their leadership might also have noticed their positions in serious jeopardy, and as the old saying goes, a key trait of a successful politician is knowing where people already are going and getting there ahead of them. I still think we need generational leadership change, and Schumer and Jeffries in particular aren’t right for where we are right now, but I won’t criticize them for taking the same gamble Washington did on the Delaware.

The Economic Terrain Was Favorable: all the shutdowns of recent memory took place in moments of relative economic prosperity, and most of the worst economic impacts happened to federal workers who inevitably were made whole when the shutdowns ended. This shutdown took place in what’s almost certainly a recession/stagflation, as all Americans perceive themselves as poorer, and as any American receiving federal dollars is certain to receive a lot fewer of them for the foreseeable future.

The Timing Was Great: I don’t know whether or not Schumer begged his wavering members to hold out until after the elections, but it worked! You have to think at least some of the Dems’ striking over-performance came from frustration at the shutdown.

Our Opponents Are Bumbling Nincompoops: Trump and Republicans just screwed this up at every turn. From boasting that his economy was booming to continuing with ICE roundups and the ballroom construction, Trump was completely tone-deaf through the whole episode. The Great Dealmaker wouldn’t even try dealing. The Great Dictator couldn’t even get his own party to blow up the filibuster. With the same smug overconfidence Lord Cornwallis had in New Jersey, Trump let himself get played.

Kudos to Saturday Night Live for really nailing the whole thing with this sketch:

So what’s the lesson? I think I’d tell Democratic leadership that they got very lucky once, but shouldn’t try it again unless very special circumstances prevail—which likely isn’t in January, when this continuing resolution runs out. Why?

You’ll Need a New Fight: coming into the 2026 campaign season, it’s time for the fight to move to what Dems can do as opposition in control of one or both houses of Congress, and on the electoral challenges the Republicans will create.

The Economy Might Not Be a Good Fight: it’s unlikely to improve anytime soon. As it gets worse and as Trump shows signs of talking about “affordability,” there’s a risk Dems get the blame for another shutdown that causes more pain.

The Timing is Questionable: the election is still almost a year away. A fight now won’t give much help to either Dem incumbents or challengers.

The Republicans… Well, They’ll Still Be Nincompoops: that’s not enough.

The exception I’d make to this strategic calculus would be if the Dems forced a shutdown simply to force Republicans to blow up the filibuster. I’d back this because a) I don’t think Dems should get behind any part of what the Trump Regime is doing, and b) the filibuster is so odious that I’ll take any means to see it die.

Crooked Con

The fine folk at Crooked Media (you might know them better as the Pod Save America multiverse of liberal podcasts) organized a convention just after the election here in Washington, DC, and I figured I’d show up and see what was going on, as an embassy political officer might do for such an event in another country. I made some contacts, got some cards, heard some interesting things, but let me give you my topline thoughts based on my strongest impressions.

Sadness (Just Me): though the crowd was pretty upbeat just a few days after the elections (to their own pleasant surprise), the event was in the Ronald Reagan Building, and that made it really hard for me for my first few hours there. The Reagan Building used to house USAID—there’s a garbage bag draped over the glass entrance to that part of the building to hide the USAID logo etched in the glass, and whoa, buddy, I cannot give you a better symbol of Trump’s America than a garbage bag half-assedly draped over a symbol of American decency in a clumsy manner that you can still see through. I have a lot of memories of meetings and coffees and lunches with colleagues and friends there, all of them better patriots than a Trumpist even can comprehend, all of whom now are unemployed, and it hit me harder than I expected when I first walked in.

Andy Beshear: wow, the Governor of Kentucky is impressive. I’ve got a strong bias against presidents who don’t have any form of national security experience—it’s the most important part of the job, even though we evaluate them on the economy, which they have the least control over—but he really came off well. I’ve gotta say, though, that while I was drawn to his manner and his ebullience, he didn’t give off an indication that he really viscerally grasped the stakes: that the 2028 election is as likely to end with martial law and candidates dead or imprisoned as it is to end in a free and fair election and a peaceful handover of power. Like Michael Corleone evaluating Tom Hagen in The Godfather, I’m not sure Beshear is a Wartime Leader. I don’t mean that in the sense of the presidential commander-in-chief role (though see my bias above), but in the sense of the leader of an opposition party in an authoritarian state. He’s got time to persuade me otherwise.

Ruben Gallego: Now, this guy gets it! I didn’t find Gallego nearly as traditional-sunny-optimist-Clinton/Obama/Biden as Beshear, but while I’m as attracted to those politicians and “running on joy” and “the audacity of hope” as the next Democrat, I felt Gallego had a much stronger grasp of where we are and what’s going to have to happen. Gallego demonstrated a determination to fight through. I swear, he reminded me of what an aide once said about Ulysses S. Grant: “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

A Little Too Sunny: of course everyone was cheerful after this election, and I’m sure the event would have been a lot darker had Dems not done so well, but the convention was months in the making, and so I feel the tone, and topics discussed, needed more realism. I found one panel discussion on authoritarianism/election security, and was disappointed to find it to be only lawyers discussing election litigation—to be fair, brilliant lawyers discussing brilliant litigating!

Look, that’s really important, as is winning elections in the first place, but I’ll say until I’m blue in the face, it’s not going to be enough. Making sure elections and rulings are followed in the face of Trump’s private army of Homeland Security, Proud Boys, and Groypers—but I repeat myself—is going to require an unprecedented level of civil mobilization and resistance, and I was disappointed nothing at the event even nodded to this fact. These folks should know better. Since you read MSU, I know you know better!

Don’t let up on the fascists, but don’t let them ruin your Thanksgiving either. Feel free to comment or DM me on Substack, and follow me there for additional periodic comments as well.

One thing I really came to respect in my time working with the U.S. military was its respect for the idea of the After Action Review—a big sit-down after any kind of training event or exercise, often with a facilitator. Even when things went very well, they’re still painstaking in looking for what could have been done better. After all, in real war, even victory can come at a high cost. I’ve seen a few AAR’s get sycophantic, or dodge an uncomfortable truth, but for the most part I’ve seen senior officers very open to hearing a junior soldier say, “Sir, that was really fucked up,” and even the occasional “Sir, you really fucked that up,” and commit to trying to change whatever went wrong.

With this spirit in mind, let’s AAR the No Kings protests. My data points will be the general national reporting, my own observations in downtown DC, and the readout I received from the rally in my small Massachusetts summer town.

I’ll start by saying that all criticisms are incidental; these rallies were an amazing success. Well done all hands!

Numbers and breadth: 5-7 million participants (maybe a lot more) is a helluva turnout, and it’s even better they were so widely distributed. I’ve heard some commentators say people should have concentrated in One Big Rally somewhere like DC or New York, but those commentators are wrong. Millions of participants couldn’t have afforded the travel, and neither city could have accommodated that many people anyway.

More important, it matters that democracy defenders in Alabama or Oklahoma, who must feel pretty isolated sometimes, see how many in their community agree with them. It also matters for committed Magas to see that Trump opposition isn’t just a bunch of big-city transgendered liberal elites; it’s relatable people in their own communities. I would value breadth over raw numbers any day.

My friends in Massachusetts had about 250 people come to their last No Kings rally this summer. This fall, they may have gotten to 1,000—and that’s after summer tourists left! That’s amazing given the year-round population of the area is barely 10,000.

Non-violence: No arrests! No Black Bloc idiots being idiots! Not even any provocateurs, which pleasantly surprises me. Non-violent discipline is really hard to maintain at scale, but we managed it, and that bodes really well. It’s true that the government made no meaningful effort to crack down on the rallies, but then again, part of the point is it’s just not possible to crack down on events of this size without the kind of mass violence that will provoke even greater resistance.

I regret to say my Massachusetts friends didn’t do so well here. One of their participants, an 81-year-old man, was arrested for assault for getting into some kind of confrontation with a bystander. It’s not clear what exactly it was about. The worst part was, this guy was an event marshal!

The entire purpose of having event marshals is to maintain non-violent discipline and to liaise with local law enforcement to help make sure things don’t get out of hand. For a marshal to get arrested for putting hands on someone, a real breakdown happened either in selecting or training that event marshal. Fortunately, this was just one small town, but write it down as a lesson nevertheless.

Rallies and Resistance: this event was great, and worthwhile, and we should do more, but don’t make more of it than it was. There’s no one magic rally that will turn the tide if it’s just big enough. That’s not how this works.

Rallies like No Kings are recruiting and training events. They get people to do the most important thing: step forward and do something unusual and uncomfortable. Many people summoned the courage to come to these events, not knowing how the state was going to respond. They had a good time and met lots of other people. They maintained non-violent discipline. They’ve gone home primed to do more when called. That’s all great, but we can’t just be calling them to do more rallies, and we definitely can’t just be texting them fundraising requests—seriously, Democrats, stop with the fucking fundraising texts!

What should be coming next? Of course I’ll get into that in a lot of future editions, but here’s a small example: the day after the rally, one of the organizers among my Massachusetts friends had a major client drop their business. This organizer has requested I not share details, but I can say that the purpose of rallies like this is to prepare people to be ready to boycott that business and shame and ostracize its owner. It’s not what my friend wants us to do right now, but it’s the sort of thing we need to be ready to do next.

What’s the other side been up to? A lot, of course, but I’d focus in on three things:

Preparing for the third term: You didn’t need to hear Steve Bannon say it to know it’s happening. It’s no coincidence that no Republicans are hiring organizers in Iowa, nor are any political analysts handicapping the 2028 GOP possibilities. We’ve already internalized and normalized that he’s going to do this, even though it’s constitutionally impossible. Of course it’s “constitutionally impossible” for an insurrectionist to be president, and here we are.

I enjoy listening to Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff’s Daily Beast podcast, “Inside Trump’s Head,” though it can at times get a bit gossipy. Wolff certainly knows Trump far better than I do, and he’s been saying for months that even Trump had limits and knew he wasn’t going to run for a third term. Just last week, he changed his mind on that, saying all Trump’s actions indicate he plans on sticking around—as does this brilliant SNL sketch.

At this point, the biggest obstacle to Trump running for a third term isn’t The Constitution, it’s his constitution—whether he lives long enough. There’s certainly plenty of reason to believe he won’t, but that shouldn’t reassure you. A Republican Party that’s okay going along to break the Constitution is one that will use any means to hold power. This is especially relevant considering no one else on their bench has whatever-the-fuck-satanic-charisma-you-call-it that Trump has. He’s still their best shot for winning fair and square.

So whether it’s Trump or some other Republican in 2028, there is no chance at all Republicans will accept a peaceful transfer of power to the Democratic Party in 2029. Oh, and Dems still actually have to win first!

Dissolving the Congress: Lost in most talk of the government shutdown and its impacts is that Speaker Mike Johnson effectively has dissolved the House of Representatives, and I’ll tell you, it might not come back before the 2026 election—meaning there’s a non-insignificant chance the shutdown will last that long too.

Not enough people are linking the shutdown with the other big congressional issue, releasing the Epstein Files. Recall the status of the Trump Budget on the Hill: the House approved it, and now it’s with the Senate, but the Republicans under John Thune don’t have a 60-vote supermajority to break the filibuster, and Senate Dems are demanding changes to the bill around Obamacare subsidies. Three things can happen:

• Republicans blow up the filibuster to pass the bill on a party-line vote: I think it’s the most likely outcome, and while that bill is disastrous, the filibuster is an abomination, so I don’t really care how the damned thing dies. But Thune is a traditionalist and there will be much rending of garments before they get to this;

• Senate Republicans negotiate with Senate Democrats and get to something they can agree on. But then the bill has to go back to the House to be approved. Not only is it unclear Johnson can rally enough Republicans for that vote, he’d have to bring the house back into session, and that means swearing in New Mexico Representative-Elect Adelita Grijalva, and that means moving the discharge petition for the release of the Epstein Files;

• The government just stays shut down and the House in recess through the 2026 election and the swearing-in of a new Congress in January 2027.

It’s increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that the Epstein Files are so bad for Trump—and maybe a lot of other Maga-aligned people, in the US and abroad—that Johnson would prioritize keeping them under wraps over maintaining a functioning government.

This also raises fears for the 2026 elections. People already are noting (correctly) that Trump might use ICE to intimidate voters, or try to challenge votes in Democrat-leaning and purple areas, but it’s also possible a Dem House is elected in 2026, and Johnson refuses to reconvene to swear them in come January 2027. I would say the answer to this would be for Dems to swear themselves into session at some alternate site, but we’d have a disastrous legitimacy crisis on our hands—one we’re honestly not prepared for. If this does happen, expect shutdown-type chaos to continue on into 2028, with Trump ruling by edicts.

I still expect the shutdown to end by Republicans nuking the filibuster, but that outcome actually lessens pressure on Johnson to bring the House back into session.

Conditioning for Violence

Again, I’m incredibly happy about how non-violent the No Kings rallies were. I’m even more surprised we didn’t see attempts to make them appear violent by provocateurs—a common regime tactic, as played out in Andor’s Ghorman Massacre story arc. There are three things, however, that are worrisome to me in the medium-term:

Continued employment of the National Guard: I don’t have any complaints with what I’ve seen of the Guard’s conduct to date—they’re doing a stupid mission with all the professionalism I expected of them.

But as more of these “quick-reaction forces” get formed dedicated to a primary “homeland security” (read “crackdown”) mission, and as they’re increasingly placed alongside cruel and abusive ICE thugs, the regime’s hope is that they become inured to abuse and move from avoiding to tolerating to conducting such acts themselves. Whether this works or not is up to what individual guardsmen and units decide—I can’t pretend to predict.

Heavy Artillery: You’ve likely heard about the Marines’ firing artillery over a California highway as a demonstration during a visit to Camp Pendleton by Vice President Vance and Secretary of Signal Chat Hegseth. They mocked Governor Gavin Newsom when he closed the highways as a precaution, but in fact one of the rounds fired air-burst prematurely and came close to killing a California highway patrolman—who was part of their own security team! It’s almost comic to imagine what they’d have said if that cop actually had been killed or wounded.

From a kid’s backyard archery setup to a Marine artillery range, it’s pretty basic that you don’t try shooting over people just to hit your target on a peacetime range. Your mom would tell you that’s how you put an eye out. I would hope that this makes a lot of government gun-carriers of different stripes realize this regime doesn’t care if they live or die, and certainly is not looking out for them.

The bigger thing this exercise did, though, is worse: it taught the regime that there are officers in the military who will violate basic safety standards to make them happy. Once you’ve conditioned them to do that, it’s just a bit easier to get them to do something else—maybe shoot flare rounds over a nighttime protest. From there, maybe smoke rounds into a bigger protest. And from there… this brings us to The AI Poop Bomber.

Of course that was silly, and it’s certainly telling that Trump’s response to being called a king is to portray himself wearing a crown, but as a guy who worked on supporting the Syrian Revolution from 2012-14, I saw something much darker here.

In the US military, the first question for someone aspiring to be a pilot is, “can they fly?” In a country like Assad-regime Syria, the first question is, does this aspiring pilot understand their job is to be ready to bomb their own countrymen in their own towns? Flying skills are secondary to loyalty to the leader—incidentally, that largely explains why the Israeli Air Force dominates the Middle East. This rot spreads across authoritarian armies gradually, but it’s accelerated by making jokes of dropping things on civilians, or by getting artillery to shoot over civilian targets. It’s also accelerated by conditioning the military to make unlawful attacks on boats in the Caribbean.

I have my doubts whether it’ll be easy to turn the US military into a regime-protection force in the timeframe Trump needs, but he’s definitely working hard at it, and I won’t say he can’t succeed. The “good” news for us is, they’re doing this because No Kings scared the shit out of them. Remember that.

As I wrap this up, it looks like elections have gone even better than expected for Democrats. I’m most pleased to see losing Republican candidates conceding—that’s a low bar for decency and honor, but they are clearing it, and it will make it harder for Trump and Magas to cry fraud. I’ve no doubt, however, that California’s Proposition 50 is headed to court, and Trump will find ways to punish New York for electing Mamdani.