donald-trump – Between Hell and High Water

The Moment of Truth

By Mike Koetting October 14, 2025

I believe we are approaching a “make-or-break” point for Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

It’s not a question of what he wants to do. That’s clear. In the last several weeks, he has replaced Federal Attorneys until he found one who would pursue an embarrassingly flimsy indictment against one of his enemies, he signed an executive order that raised the possibility almost any kind of dissent could be treated as “treason,” he posted on Truth Social that Democrats are “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN,” and he lectured the leaders of the Armed Services that their mission included fighting the “enemies within”.

His approach to controlling immigration is increasingly inhumane. His masked marauders have grabbed people off the streets with little regard for their situations or actual legal status. Here in Chicago, along with the wanton cruelty and indifference to legality, there has been a major performance element designed to intimidate: armed border guards patrolling the Chicago River, military marches down Michigan Avenue on a Sunday afternoon and ICE agents rappelling from Blackhawk helicopters into apartments filled with sleeping families—separating children from parents and causing total pandemonium. Now Trump is calling for Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson to be jailed.

Republican Organization Is (Mostly) an Illusion

By Mike Koetting June 10, 2025

How many times have you heard someone say: “Democrats need to get organized like Republicans.” I don’t have any problem with the idea of getting organized. What I find problematic is the idea that the Republicans have some magic template. For the most part, they are as disorganized as Democrats. They have simply hitched their wagons to one of the world’s most accomplished grifters and let him drag them wherever he wants to go. This simplifies organization enormously. To be sure, Trump has accommodated them by making various nods in the directions of long-time Republican goals. But it is erratic, inconsistent, and can be seen as part of an organized plan only through a peculiar lens. See below about Project 2025.

How Many Deaths for Congressional Republicans?

By Mike Koetting May 13, 2025

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Republicans in Congress are today playing out their own version. By failing to take on any of the winnable small battles, they are slipping toward a situation where the entire foundation of the country could be up for grabs. Most Congressional Republicans understand that Donald Trump is playing fast and loose with the separation of powers—and in the process taking away Congressional power.

Inequality Is Giving Money to Rich People

Mike Koetting April 22, 2025

Many Americans are white-hot angry at their situation in life. More and more families are having a difficult time making ends meet. The sense that they are no longer fully participating in the promised life can be found everywhere. Two-thirds of middle-class families say they are struggling financially.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many families are feeling short-changed since the richest Americans are increasing their share of wealth at the expense of everyone else. This is primarily a result of deliberate policy decisions. The surprise is that so many of the people feeling short-changed voted for an agenda promising more of the same.

In 2023, the total share of income earned by the bottom 90% of workers was less than 50%. In other words, the bottom 90% altogether made less than the top 10%. There is nothing inevitable about such a distribution. Most countries with American standards of living have more equal income distributions. In fact, America used to have a more equal distribution.

What Are the Republicans Thinking?

By Mike Koetting March 4, 2025

Twice before in my life, I experienced a sensation that our basic political system was in mortal danger. Once in 1970 on the day protestors were killed at Kent State and three years later when Richard Nixon precipitated the Saturday Night Massacre. In both cases, however, the sensation only lasted for a few hours. I found I had a deep-seated conviction that the series of checks and balances would work, even if a bit wobbly for a time.

Today I am finding that confidence waning.

Throughout our history, our system has worked because powerful individuals were willing to be constrained by institutions, by the system of checks and balances that provide some assurance that a small number of individuals can’t ride roughshod over the rest.

It isn’t as if these powerful individuals were all particularly virtuous—some were and others not so much. It was more that they operated in an environment of a shared understanding that if you wrecked the system, what came next would be worse. Democracy is what allows people with differences to work together over time.

So, although there have always been individuals who would have thrown over the institution, other than the Civil War, the broader ethic prevailed. Those who would have done way with these checks and balances have been restrained. A year after the Saturday Night Massacre, a group of Republican Senators told Nixon that he would be impeached if he did not resign.

What is different about today is not so much that Donald Trump would throw over the institutions, but that there are so many people who are willing to let him do so even though they know better.

Many citizens are so deeply alienated by the current moment and feel so powerless they don’t worry about Constitutional considerations. I am disappointed, but I understand.

However, I cannot fathom what is going through the minds of various Republican Representatives and Senators. What is their rationale for allowing Donald Trump so much leeway? It is implausible that they don’t understand they are destroying the checks and balances that have been fundamental to America for 250 years. Do they really believe that putting all the power in the President is a good idea? And while they may be happy that Trump will accomplish some things that they want and whack away at some things they oppose, do they really believe this is a sustainable model for running a country?

Reality Can’t Get to the Table

By Mike Koetting October 10, 2024

Twenty years ago, we were all a twitter about a George Bush adviser deriding “reality- based media.” He may get the last laugh. We in the reality-based world are still struggling. Close to half the electorate is committed to various fables. The delusionary nature of that bubble is clear to those on the outside. But, in the short run, a large part of the nation seems wedded to this cartoon version of the world.

There are plenty of legitimate differences between Harris and traditional Republican positions that should be open for debate. But Trump has simply turned his back on reality-based discussion and, in the process, opened a whole lot of territory in which people can find all kinds of responses and reasons to believe. It also makes it easier for the truly extreme to feel they are licensed.

Vance Is Misleading the Hillbillies

By Mike Koetting October 1, 2024

My wife regularly reads Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter and from time to time reads potentially interesting passages to me. The other morning I almost got whiplash doing a double take at something JD Vance said a few years ago:

American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins. And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyper-woke, coastal elites. The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years. And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people. That’s just a fundamental thing that’s happening in American politics.

My first reaction was stunned amazement. Was he suggesting, for instance, that it would have been okay if the South had won the Civil War? On second thought, I was struck with how flaccid an explanation he was offering for the “fundamental thing that’s happening in American politics.”

Causes versus Institutions

By Mike Koetting September 17, 2024

Just before taking off on a short trip with our grandson, I read a review in the Washington Post of a political thriller, Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart, that it described as “unnervingly prescient.” While written 25 years ago, plot elements include a highly contested vote count, renegade Arab terrorists, impeachments and a rogue Supreme Court. Sounded just like the thing for a trip to Washington DC.

It was, as promised, an exciting thriller that I had a hard time putting down. It also turned out to be an interesting meditation on the philosophical orientations toward politics and government, specifically, what is the right balance between strongly-held values and maintaining the institutions of governing?

Are the Rule of Law’s Foundations Eroding…Or Being Dismantled?

By Mike Koetting June 18, 2024

Over the last several years, I have realized that “the rule of law” is only secondarily related to laws. It is a lot more inchoate and contingent than anything as concrete as a law. At root, it is nothing more—and nothing less—than a vague agreement among a populace that they are willing to share a common project of governing under some loosely agreed upon rules, even if—indeed, because—there are other values they don’t share. Absent that agreement, no laws or no courts can make democracy work.

I suspect at any given time over the last 150 years, there were a discernible number of citizens who viewed some social error so fundamental that this agreement to govern jointly in toleration should be dissolved. But as long as the number willing to carry on was a substantial majority, the agreement sustained and bumbled on to its next crisis.