The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Photo of mural in the city of Qom (cc) 2013 by David Stanley.
I think the most rational response to President Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is to hang back a bit — that is, to acknowledge that he’s the wrong leader to do this, that he was more likely acting on ego and personal pique than out of any strategic vision, but that it’s too soon to tell whether this will be a disaster or might actually accomplish some good.
One starting point is that Iran shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Another starting point is to understand that what led to this really is all Trump’s fault. President Barack Obama painstakingly negotiated an agreement with Iran that significantly slowed Iran’s race to get a nuclear bomb, and Trump undid that in his first term for no discernible reason other than to disrespect Obama.
Lincoln led not just the birth of a new nation but of a new political party as well.
We are awash in terrible news, so this morning I’d like to address something completely different. On Saturday, Nate Cohn of The New York Times asked, “Is There an Opening for a Third Party?” (gift link). My answer is an emphatic no, with a caveat.
Cohn is a smart guy who understands numbers. But he omits some important reasons for why the rise of a real alternative to the Democrats and Republicans will remain a fantasy unless it is accompanied by a thorough-going change in the way we hold elections.
Cohn’s reasoning for why there might be an opening is solid, though I think that opening is much smaller than he imagines. He argues that as the two major parties have both embraced different forms of populism, the neoliberals and globalists who were ascendant as recently as 20 years ago have been left behind. He writes:
What’s the group? It doesn’t have a name, but it favors things like deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration. It may be recognizable by the labels its critics on both the left and right have already assigned: “neoliberals” or “globalists.” (Though, to be fair, this new group doesn’t necessarily idealize markets or oppose government spending.)
So essentially Cohn is talking about Never Trump conservatives plus Joe Manchin. You could fit them all in a phone booth. (For you young ’uns, here’s a phone booth.) Cohn pays lip service to past examples of third parties like the Progressives of the early 20th century and the Republicans in the 1850s. But he misses some vital context.
A two-party system is baked into our politics not because anyone likes it but because we have winner-take-all elections in which the candidate who comes in first is the victor, even if they get less than 50% of the vote. Yes, I realize there are some exceptions, such as jurisdictions that hold runoffs or have embraced ranked-choice voting. But that’s how it works for nearly all of our major-office elections such as the House, the Senate and gubernatorial races. (Let’s not get started on the Electoral College.)
Now, I don’t want to take credit for an idea that I read somewhere else recently. I can’t seem to find it, but I thought it was something that Josh Marshall wrote for Talking Points Memo. But the examples of the Republicans and the Progressives actually show why third parties flop.
First, the Republicans couldn’t succeed unless they replaced the Whigs, which were one of the two major parties along with the Democrats. The Whigs were conflicted on slavery while the Democrats were all for it. Thus there was an opening for a party that was staunchly anti-slavery. Within just a few years’ time, the Whigs fell apart and were replaced by the Republicans, maintaining the major-party duopoly. So that’s my caveat, and it’s not much of one.
The Progressives actually ran a popular former president, Theodore Roosevelt, as their standard-bearer in 1912. Roosevelt managed to come in second, with the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, finishing in third and getting swamped in the Electoral College. Roosevelt’s challenge succeeded only in getting Democrat Woodrow Wilson elected, and he proved to be a racist warmonger with an unparalleled contempt for civil liberties.
Progressive ideas started to permeate into the two major parties, especially the Democratic party. And Roosevelt’s distant cousin Franklin embraced a progressive agenda once he became president in 1933.
So how would we have to change the system in order to give a third party a chance to emerge as a significant force? With congressional and state legislative races, the surest route to new parties would be multicandidate districts and proportional presentation, as explained in this data-rich opinion piece (gift link; trust me when I tell you this is well worth your time) published by The New York Times earlier this year. The piece even anticipates the emergence of five parties under such a system. (I’d be a New Liberal with some New Populist sympathies.)
Massachusetts has nine U.S. House members, so imagine dividing the state into two districts, one with five members and the other with four. Let’s say that in the five-member district 60% of voters chose the New Liberal Party (traditional Democrats, more or less), 40% chose the Growth and Opportunity Party (traditional Republicans) and 20% chose the Progressive Party. The district would send three Democrats, two Republicans and one Progressive to Washington. The other two parties under this scheme: the Patriot Party (Trumpers) and Christian Conservatives.
Such a system, the Times essay argues, would encourage coalition-building and would give voters the opportunity to feel like there’s a party that represents their beliefs and interests — something that is entirely missing today.
All of this is why talking about a third party is a waste of time unless it’s accompanied by deep, systemic change. Given our slide into populist authoritarianism and the emergence of millions of Americans who oppose that slide, either we’re further than ever from trying something completely new — or we’re closer than we’ve ever been before.
This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.
Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.
I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:
While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.
Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.
Public media’s last stand
I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.
As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.
So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.
A curious omission
There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.
It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.
I don’t want to waste a lot of space on the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Pixels aren’t cheap, you know. But I do want to push back on the notion that this is (1) some kind of pre-arranged stunt; (2) a distraction from what’s really important; or (3) a prelude to their eventual reconciliation. I think it’s both real and important, and that the fallout will be long-lasting.
“Well, Elon Musk finally found a way to make Twitter fun again,” wrote Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer for his newsletter, The Message Box. Indeed it is fun — these are two people who are doing enormous damage to our country, and it’s hard not to enjoy watching their very public falling-out.
Trump has no friends. One of the keys to the way he operates is that he also has no permanent allies and no permanent enemies. Everything is conditional. After all, he and Steve Bannon patched up their relationship after Bannon absolutely torched him in Michael Wolff’s book 2018 book “Fire and Fury.”
But Musk has suggested that Trump was involved in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile sex ring, and that goes many steps beyond a normal knock-down-drag-out. Here’s what Musk wrote on Twitter: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Of course, “in the Epstein files” is doing a lot of work in that tweet. Trump has been photographed with Epstein and even joked (gift link) about Epstein’s predeliction for young girls, because that’s the kind of dirtbag Trump is. Musk, though, is hinting at something much, much worse on Trump’s part.
Now, it has to be said there’s no reason to believe that Musk even knows what’s in the Epstein files, and that if Trump is in there, it’s likely as a walk-on, not as a participant. As much as I loathe Trump, he strikes me as way too cautious to get caught up in anything that evil — and, more to the point, illegal. (Before you @ me, read this.)
Musk also has a habit of accusing his enemies of engaging in child rape. Here’s an example, and it’s not the only one. What’s missing are any examples of Musk kissing and make up with someone he’s accused of such horrendous activities.
Right-wing billionaire Bill Ackman took to Twitter and urged Musk and Trump to “make peace.” Musk responded, “You’re not wrong.” But though the two may find it’s in their best interest not to maintain a white-hot level of animosity, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that Musk will ever return to a position of real power in Trump’s White House. Good.
The Trump administration’s war on access to knowledge will result in the end of public library access in Massachusetts to a number of academic databases and The Boston Globe. The cuts take effect on July 1.
The dispiriting news is reported in a memo issued May 20 by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners that is weirdly titled “MBLC Maintains some Databases, Support for eBooks, and ComCat.” I don’t mean to be critical of the commissioners, since Trump’s perversity is not their fault. But the news here is what’s being cut, not what’s being saved.
The cuts are the result of an executive order issued by Trump on March 14 titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” The order eliminates a number of agencies and programs, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which in the current fiscal year provided $3.6 million for library services in Massachusetts as well as grants to local libraries. The MBLC spent about $2.2 million of its federal allocation on access to various online databases. MBLC director Maureen Amyot said in a statement:
The federal impact cannot be overstated. In Massachusetts, over 1,600 school, public, academic and special libraries from across the state benefit from federal IMLS funding. Millions of people rely on federally funded library services. Developing a plan for services in an environment of almost daily federal change has been challenging, but our goal has remained constant: to maintain services that are integral to the functioning of our system and heavily relied on by the people of the Commonwealth.
The MBLC was able to preserve access to some databases. The decisions about what to cut and what to keep were based on usage, according to the MBLC. In addition, the statewide program that funds access to e-books and audiobooks will continue, as well the Commonwealth Catalog, or ComCat, which provides access to items that a local library may not have.
Needless to say, there is no reason for any of this. Trump inherited a strong economy that continues to perform reasonably well despite his efforts to take a wrecking ball to it. These cuts call to mind his infamous outburst in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.” It appears that he wants to keep them that way.
Sen. John Fetterman. Photo (cc) 2022 by the office of Gov. Tom Wolf.
New York magazine has published an incredibly disturbing story (paywalled, but see below) about U.S. Sen John Fetterman, the hoodie-wearing Pennsylvania Democrat who was elected in 2022 while recovering from a serious stroke.
Reporter Ben Terris portrays Fetterman as suffering from what sounds like serious mental-health issues. We knew about his struggles with depression, but this goes much deeper than that, veering into what at times seems like a disconnection from reality, compounded by a refusal to take his medications.
Adding to its power is that much of the story is based on the on-the-record comments of Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, as well as a 1,600-word email that Jentleson wrote to Fetterman’s doctor. “I believed in John’s ability to work through struggles that lots of Americans share,” he told Terris. “He’s not locked into a downward trajectory; he could get back in treatment at any time, and for a long time I held out hope that he would. But it’s just been too long now, and things keep getting worse.”
This is an important piece of journalism, but unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall. So I’m going to tell you something you may or may not know: There’s a service that lets people save paywalled articles at publications they subscribe to so that others can read them for free. It’s at archive.is. You can search by keywords or URL. That’s how I found the Fetterman article.
I’m going to be a hypocrite and tell you that I’m uncomfortable sharing free links from archive.is, but that I’m not adverse at telling you how you can do it yourself. So if you want to read the Fetterman story, you know what to do.
It’s now being laughed off as a joke, and I suppose that’s right. But social media on Tuesday was going a little nuts over Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ridiculous post on Twitter in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s expressed desire to be the next pope. I thought the always astute Richard Nixon, writing on Bluesky, put it best:
On the bright side, becoming pope would get Trump out of the U.S.
Tough Times in LA
Jeff Bezos isn’t the only billionaire-gone-bad who’s running a major American newspaper. In fact, he may not even be the worst. After all, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before Bezos did the same at The Washington Post, is actually using AI to label the bias of opinion journalists.
An aside: Opinion journalists are supposed to be biased.
Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy, who’s done yeoman’s work in keeping track of the LA Times’ travails, writes that layoffs are on the way. Darcy also cites reporting by Adweek that the paper lost $50 million in 2024 and that subscribers continue to head for the exits.
You’d like to think that steady, forward-looking ownership would put the Times in a position to thrive as other billionaire-owned papers have done — principally The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Maybe Boston and the Twin Cities are just better news towns with a higher level of civic engagement than the notoriously transient Los Angeles area. Still, Soon-Shiong’s feckless and irresponsible management certainly has not helped.
The crypto presidency
I read this in horror Tuesday — an in-depth investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s crypto grift, an entirely new way for foreign powers to bribe Trump while skirting federal laws.
As Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess report, the Trump-controlled crypto company World Liberty Financial also puts the Trump family in close contact with some might unsavory characters. They write:
The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.
Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
Because it’s the last day of the month and I still have some gift links to distribute, you can read it here for free. And here’s a gift link to a sidebar on yet another dubious Trump crypto relationship.
It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.
We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.
Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.
David Brooks. 2022 LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin.
Today is going to be a big grading day. But before I get started, I want to share with you a remarkable column by David Brooks of The New York Times (gift link) as well as a couple of eye-opening statements from the political right.
Moderate in his politics, deeply conservative by nature, Brooks is a longstanding anti-Trumper, but he leans toward the rhetorical rather than advocating any sort of specific action beyond voting. Now, though, he’s calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” and closes by alluding to Karl Marx: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” He writes:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault.
Earlier this week, another prominent anti-Trump conservative, Bill Kristol, posted a photo on Bluesky of ICE thugs detaining Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and wrote: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?”
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the last remaining moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, spoke frankly about the fear that she and other members of her party feel about what might happen to them if they speak out against Trump. Just to say that out loud is an important step, although of course it needs to be followed by action. At a public forum she said:
We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.
I don’t want to get carried away. Over the past decade, there has been no group less influential and consequential than the tiny band of Never Trump Republicans and conservatives. But we may be starting to see the stirrings of — well, of something.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.
We are about to experience the full consequences — or, rather, the lack of consequences — stemming from the Democrats’ electoral wipeout last November.
The texting scandal exposed by The Atlantic earlier this week is serious business. As you have no doubt heard, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used that chat to share war plans about an upcoming air attack in Yemen. In case you haven’t had a chance to read Goldberg’s story, here’s a gift link.
The scandal raises all sorts of questions. Why were top White House officials using Signal, a commercial app not approved for secure governmental communications? Signal messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time; were steps taken to override that and preserve those messages in accordance with the law? Are Signal chats about sensitive national security issues common within Trump’s inner circle? Are any foreign adversaries listening in? (One of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, took part while he was in Russia.)
So where do we go from here? Not very far, I’m afraid. A number of observers have compared this to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, which became the cause célèbre of the 2016 presidential campaign. So consider:
• This time there will be no criminal investigation — or, if anyone tries, Donald Trump will quickly shut it down. James Comey is not walking through that door. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president in 2016, but he was also a person of integrity who did not interfere with the independence of the Justice Department or the FBI. Such is no longer the case.
• There will be no congressional investigation, not with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. (In 2016, Republicans held both branches.) House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to fire Hegseth, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that Republicans and Democrats should work together on a “full investigation.” Good luck with that.
• Absent a criminal investigation or meaningful congressional hearings, the media coverage will soon fade away. We all remember The New York Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, but we tend to forget that it was largely fed by governmental action, especially by Comey. It was his last-minute intervention over what he described as another round of emails — followed by a “never mind” — that probably cost Clinton the election.
The print edition of today’s Times leads with two stories related to the scandal. I thought I’d point that out given the outrage I saw on social media claiming that Tuesday’s print edition played the story down — a consequence, I’m sure, of early print deadlines and the difficulty of reacting instantly to a huge story broken by another media outlet.
Unless there are more revelations, though, the media wave is likely to crest within the next few days. And then we’ll be on to the next Trump scandal.
Correction: I had a brain cramp regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s name. Now fixed.
