History Readings

onspiracism is not an inherently right-wing indulgence. After September 11, many in liberal circles fell for nonsense alleging that the Bush administration was secretly behind the attacks

A person, alone in conversation, can be rational. People, in a crowd, become something else.

As different as some of the people I spoke with at these Trump rallies could be, when they went into the crowd, they experienced the ecstasy of the cruelties they would perhaps not allow themselves to indulge in alone. The rationalizations and explanations and denial melted away. They understood that they were there to mock and condemn those they hate and fear, and to listen to all of Trump’s vows to punish them.

The outer circle treats Trump’s authoritarianism and racism as regrettable and perhaps too colorful, but equivalent or similar to other common character defects possessed by all politicians. To acknowledge the liberal critique of Trump as correct would amount to a painful step away from a settled political identity that these outer-circle members are not willing to take—they would have to join the Never Trumpers in exile.

The innermost circle denies the radicalism of its agenda to the middle ring of fervent Trump supporters, presenting any criticism as the lies of the same liberal elites responsible for dispossessing real Americans of what is owed them

Denial is the mortar that holds the three MAGA circles together

This group of Trump voters treat his authoritarianism as mere bombast or as exaggerations from the media, seeing this election as an ordinary one in which a party with a bad economic record should be replaced by a party with a better one, not an election in which a man who tried to destroy American democracy is running for a chance to finish the job.

Then there is the outer circle: Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate.

they are so isolated from mainstream news sources that they believe Trump’s claims that he has no ties to it, and that he has their best interests in mind because “he cannot be bought” by the same elites they believe are responsible for their hardships.

There is a second, slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong. They are not ideologically hostile to the welfare state—indeed, many of them value it—but they believe it is being wasted on those who have no claim to i

There are, I’ve come to see, three circles of MAGA that make up the Trump coalition.

The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s. Trump’s advisers and other conservative-movement figures understand Trump’s populism as a smoke screen designed to conceal their agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy, banning abortion, eviscerating the social safety net, and slashing funding for education, health care, and other support for low-income people

This faction wants a government that works to preserve traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, or at least one that does not seek to interfere with what it sees as the natural order of things.

This innermost circle includes legislative allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act; policy aides such as Vought, who has spoken of mass deportation as a means to “end multiculturalism”; and elite backers such as Elon Musk

But he said the interview “was horrible” and put words in the poet’s mouth that she would never have used, making her sound “bland,” “naïve” and of “no interest whatsoever.” But that, he added, was heartening because “it shows that A.I. does not yet work” as well as humans. “If the interview had been really good,” he said, “it would be terrifying.”

In a Facebook post, he said the use of A.I. to fake an interview with the dead Nobel Prize winner had left him speechless. “If that is not a breach of journalistic ethics,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

Among those outraged by Mr. Pulit’s experiment was Jaroslaw Juszkiewicz, a radio journalist whose voice was used for more than a decade to guide drivers using the Polish version of Google Maps. His replacement by a metallic computer-generated voice in 2020 stirred fury on social media, prompting Google to restore Mr. Juszkiewicz, at least for a time.

An ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.

Actual data seldom tells a simple tale of disaster or triumph, but in this case, indicators of national well-being over recent decades suggest that the reports of our nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated, if not downright delusional.

Let’s consider a sample of eight indicators of national well-being over the past half-century or so.

I date the beginnings of America's democratic decline to 1993. The Neoliberal Order established by the Reagan Revolution had, to put it bluntly, failed in policy terms. Newt Gingrich decided that since the Republican Party could not win by pointing to policy success it should try to win by arousing a combination of scorn and fear.

Gen Z is especially likely to get news daily on social media platforms when compared with older Millennials (74% compared with 68% for older Millennials).

John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s third chief of staff, recommended aides read “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.” He thought it would help them understand the way Trump’s strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.

The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.

every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams

One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.

You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?

What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president, having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.

Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

Let me state what everybody knows: There are many things politicians believe that they do not say. The norms of politics — the norms of simple politeness — suppress much that people feel. There are vast swaths of political opinion you’re not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn’t have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it’s the fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn’t our ally or our partner — it’s our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal, that they are the enemy and the power of the state should be turned against them.

It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it of

During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane

It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.

Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling

He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn

He once told a biographer: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”I believe him totally when he says that

If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?

There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.

In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same tim

Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages:

Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”

Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order.

The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it

He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid

In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters.

Esper: He says: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe that loss. I’m personally persuaded by the reporting that he’d come to believe very weird theories both of fraud and that he could be reinstated as president.

Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried, in every possible way he could, to overturn the election

What is remarkable to me about that answer — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us hav

When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively

If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself.

The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him

Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.

And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.

But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doin

I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answe

When, Ross asked, did Vance decide he actually liked Donald Trump?

Vance is one of many now who’ve made it their mission to see that Trump’s future orders are carried out, no matter their content

Vance has been arguing this for some time. Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn’t Trump trying to overturn elections or Trump doing dangerous things in office but Trump’s will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him:

The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises.

we know that aging can make disinhibition worse. The August 2020 edition of the journal Psychology and Aging was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears, in many studies, to decline as we get older

It is hard not to think of that research when I read that Trump’s rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump’s ability to ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it’s the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening

What has changed even more than Trump are the people and institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump’s patronage. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, are out, while Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. JD Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state — to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump — and turn the entire machinery of the government to Trump’s whims.

Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully.

for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.

Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.

But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.

What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.

For much of the history of antitrust policy, which dates to the late 19th century, courts remained suspicious of market consolidation and used antitrust to maintain competition. In a landmark case in 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil, which controlled nearly 90 percent of the U.S. oil market, had used predatory pricing, control of oil pipelines and leverage with railroad shippers to unfairly obstruct competitors. It ordered the company be broken up.

And when rivals did emerge, Amazon often bought them. Third-party retailers lacking an alternative sell their wares on Amazon’s marketplace only to say they found their most successful products copied and sold by Amazon itself. Meanwhile, the company routinely changes and obfuscates prices, making it harder for consumers to obtain the supposed benefits of online shopping.

As the internet matured in the early 2000s, there was hope it would spur a new generation of businesses by lowering the cost of reaching national or even global markets. Instead, a handful of enormous companies dominate key technology markets. To this day, and notwithstanding a surge since the pandemic, rates of entrepreneurship languish below the rate set in 2006.

The most successful of the new tech giants found ways to leverage online markets to their advantage. Take Amazon. By offering below-cost prices its rivals couldn’t match, it established itself as the gateway for digital commerce, and over time it has been able to erect further barriers to entry only possible in the internet age, like its rich data on consumer behavior and its huge repository of consumer reviews.

That began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s, when legal scholars, influenced by free-market economists, argued that markets can police themselves, and the focus of antitrust should be on maintaining the quantity and prices of goods rather than on the levels of competition or number of businesses. If a large corporation wanted to undercut a smaller rival on price, that isn’t predatory, but a benefit to consumers.

Now, Amazon controls something like 40 percent of online retail in the United States. Google controls 90 percent of the global search market. Meta owns three of the four largest social media platforms. And already Amazon, Meta and Google, along with Microsoft, are positioned to control the future of artificial intelligence.

In 2017, Lina Khan, then a student, identified the problem in an influential law review article that argued that Big Tech was amassing market power in ways that failed to register in the current legal regime. Appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission four years later, she immediately set about pushing for a return to the more expansive antitrust jurisprudence of earlier eras.

You would think that venture capitalists — who purport to be in the business of displacing incumbents — might support the F.T.C. Instead, many have attacked.

Ms. Khan is “not a rational human being,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who sits on the board of Microsoft, has argued that Ms. Khan is trying to “dismantle companies” and called on a future President Harris to replace her.

I believe the attacks on Ms. Khan and the F.T.C. are an effort to protect the few very large technology companies that dominate markets

Venture capitalists must find ways to cash out on their investments, and in a world where four out of five of those cashouts involve selling startups to bigger firms, Big Tech is now venture capital’s biggest customer. The game might be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.

As markets concentrate, newly entrenched monopolies start exercising their power to foreclose challenges. They lock up talent, hoard patents and engage in predatory pricing. Entrepreneurs face more and more hurdles. Consumers and the economy suffer.

A robust federal antitrust program may be the only force that can liberate technology markets from the hold of Big Tech and restore venture capitalists to their true calling: advancing the cycle of innovation that powers American capitalism.

Democrats are going through the same process Republicans did over the 2010s when they realized that the cultural power centers of America are hostile to their political vision. Democrats are realizing that market power is political power.

Biden put both factions in his government

Senator Chuck Schumer’s daughter works for Amazon, so did former Obama spokesperson Jay Carney, as does Kamala Harris’ close advisor Karen Dunn. Bezos himself gave $100 million apiece to Democratic validators Van Jones and Chef Jose Andre, purely as gifts. He also donated $100 million to Barack Obama’s Presidential library. Much of the social issue-oriented infrastructure of the party, the so-called “woke” faction, is financed by corporate money from dominant firms.

Amazon is also integrated into the Democratic party itself.

Powerful Democratic insiders like former Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick are on the board of Amazon. Gorelick is a partner at Wilmer Hale, and when Merrick Garland was nominated to become Attorney General, she put up a note on her firm biography about how close she is with him, going all the way back to undergraduate days at Harvard.

it’s not a coincidence that at this same time, there is an upsurge of support for Khan and this vision of the party.

Brian Schatz, a very normie Democratic Senator, expressed a new consensus within the party when he said, “Vote against the oligarchs. Vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.” It’s rare to associate the Democrats with fighting oligarchy. Yet, as Democratic pundit Josh Marshall put it about the role of billionaires in public life, now “you can’t not see it.”

While his Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon for antitrust violations, that has not affected most administration and government officials, who largely admires the firm. For instance, the Biden Small Business Administration is steering business to Amazon, the NSA is giving billions in classified contracts to AWS, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is lobbying for Amazon in Europe, and the new AI safety part of the government has Amazon as a member.

now Democrats are being forced to see that billionaires are less interested in courage than, well, money. It seems like an obvious insight, but there we go.

Moreover, powerful executives are announcing they will use their power over core social infrastructure, and fuse it with the state. In fact, they may be preparing to do just that.

The answer to this crisis of democracy, and yes it's a crisis, is very simple. The government needs to take apart these giant firms that are too big to manage

Who is doing that? Well, it turns that Democrats actually have a faction that is trying, in the form of anti-monopolists, like FTC Chair Lina Khan, and Antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter

Others felt that billionaires were so powerful they were unafraid of political retribution from Donald Trump, and therefore, natural allies

now we all see the truth that Louis Brandeis put forward a hundred years ago: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."

I don’t know what will happen from here, but something fundamental in the party view changed this week. And there are a lot of people within the party who are going to fight this shift, and whose institutional loyalties are going to be put under real strain.

no longer can anyone seriously argue that the only way to think of Amazon, or any big business, is as a purely economic actor. Jeff Bezos just forced the Democrats to see that economic power is political power.

Prior to this moment, many party elites thought that the superrich, or big business, didn’t matter as much as local elites, like car dealers or trade associations.