Some further reflections

 On July 2, 1964, just a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  According to his press secretary Bill Moyers, that evening, he remarked, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."  Telling the same story on another occasion, Moyers amended this to, "We may have lost the South for your lifetime--and mine."  If the second version is true, LBJ got it exactly right.  Bill Moyers died last year--and this week, the era of Republican domination south of the Mason Dixon line came to an astonishingly dramatic end.  It's a turning point in American history that spectacularly vindicates the whole civil rights movement and the original vision of a nation of equal citizens.

The turning point manifested itself in many ways, not least the extraordinary landslide Senate victories of Roy Moore in North Carolina and James Talarico in Texas, the latter accompanied by the gubernatorial victory of Gina Hinojosa.  Yet the truly mind-boggling results, to those of us who remember LBJ and what he did, came from South Carolina and Mississippi, which finally, definitively emerged from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Here some history is in order.

When the Civil War came to an end and Reconstruction began, only three southern states had actual majority black populations: South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  The other states could restore white supremacy via the ballot box within a decade or so even if their former slaves voted, but they could not.  As a result, they witnessed the worst political and racial violence and the rapid intimidation of their black populations to prevent them from voting.  Mississippi and South Carolina produced a long series of racist demagogues such as James Vardaman, Theodore Bilbo, James Eastland, John Rankin, Cotton Ed Smith, and Strom Thurmond, who ran on the Dixiecrat ticket against Harry Truman in 1948 to protest Truman's civil rights proposals and led the exodus into the Republican Party in the mid-1960s.  By 1900 such politics had become mainstream in other southern states as well. Mississippi in my teenage years was the scene of some of the worst outrages and greatest crises of the civil rights era: the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962, which could only take place with the aid of federal troops;  the murder of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers by Byron de la Beckwith in 1963, for which Beckwith was initially acquitted and not convicted until the early 1990s; and the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, whose perpetrators also initially escaped justice, although some did serve sentences on federal civil rights charges. And it was in Mississippi that LBJ's prophecy played out most dramatically.  By the 1990s the state had transitioned from one-party white Democracy to one-party white Republicanism.  

There was another awful consequence of the backlash to the civil rights movement.  Thanks in large part to the New Deal, the South by the 1950s had elected a number of Senators and Congressmen who were important and powerful liberals on every issue except race.  They included Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. in Tennessee, Claude Pepper in Louisiana, John Sparkman and Lister Hill of Alabama, a number of important Congressmen, and last but hardly least, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.  Kefauver and Johnson even became liberals on civil rights, as did Johnson's colleague Ralph Yarborough, elected in 1958.  One by one these figures disappeared.  North Carolina had been a relatively liberal southern state, but Jesse Helms became its leading political figure in the 1980s and 1990s.

A succession of Republican strategists--Richard Nixon, Kevin Phillips, Ronald Reagan (who started his 1980 campaign in the county fair near where the Mississippi civil rights murders had taken place), Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Donald Trump--made the South the focus of successful campaigns.  They added the emerging social issues of the 1970s and 1980s to the race issue, fueling opposition to gay rights in particular.  It seemed that we remained two nations--until just two days ago.

The Republican debacle, to put it bluntly, also owes a good deal to another change in Republican strategy: their weakness for pathetically stupid candidates.  That problem burst on the national scene in 2008 when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate  Many more have followed in her wake, including Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton in Texas, Lauren Boebert (who is losing her seat as I write) in Colorado, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (who surprised us all this year) in Georgia.  Donald Trump fit the same mold, and promoted other candidates like him.  And this really caught up to them in South Carolina and Mississippi. Darline Graham immediately showed that she lacked the background to become a national leader, and incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi apparently doomed her campaign by proposing that Mississippians turn to another form of protein if meat were too expensive.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party came up with a troop of engaging, smart young candidates of all shapes, sizes, colors, and professions.  They have won.  160 years later, we have shaken the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

No one obviously should believe that Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina will never elect Republicans again, or that they will reliably vote Democratic for president.  That isn't the point.  The point is that those states now have real two-party systems and will no longer harbor rotten boroughs that breed very indifferent legislators on both sides. They will have to pay attention to the real needs of their constituents. In a column on civil rights not long after Brown v. Board of Education had been handed down, I.F. Stone noted that some progress toward integration had been made in Kentucky and Tennessee.  That, he said, was no surprise:  those states had two-party systems, and Negroes voted.  The same can now be said, praise the lord, for most of the South, and I expect that Alabama, Tennessee (where Democrats appear to have missed a bet this time), and Louisiana will follow. Arkansas, oddly, now looks like the most solidly Republican state in the entire region.

Perhaps it is time to stop talking about our hopeless racism.  I have made it clear that I did not regret the Supreme Court decision to effectively eliminate the provision of the Voting Rights Act upon which the conscious creation of majority black districts was based.  Those districts removed any need for black legislators to appeal to white voters, and vice versa.  Now black-white-brown coalitions have won statewide elections in Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi, where all the indications are that Scott Colum will prevail.  The CNN exit polls--now renamed Voter polls--show that white voters, including poor white voters, swung significantly towards the Democratic Party. It's the urgent task of the new Democratic majorities to put forward measures that will help the lower half of our population, regardless of race.  We still have huge obstacles to real progress and I'll be addressing them later.  But the end of a long national nightmare is on the horizon, our democracy suddenly looks stronger than the democracies of any major European nation, and we will have a new generation of leadership.  We couldn't have asked for anything more.

The Morning After

 The biggest loser in yesterday's landslide was not Donald Trump.  It was another Boomer, Newt Gingrich, who managed to redraw the political map in ways that have kept the Republican Party in or near power for the last five decades.  While the Democratic base eroded, with the Northeast losing relative population and the Midwest turning purple to red, the Republicans secured hegemony in the rapidly growing Sunbelt, with the exception of California.  They have evidently overplayed their hand.  In one extraordinary night, some of the most solidly Republican states have gone purple, and the largest of them all, Texas, looks like it might have gone blue.  And the Republicans have lost Senate seats in at least one and maybe two of the most historically reactionary and racist states in the union, South Carolina and Mississippi.  I never expected to see that in my lifetime and I feel like a great weight has been lifted off me.  The Civil War, whose origins I am now studying in detail, is finally over, a fitting 161 years (= 2x80) after the fighting stopped.

Let me begin with some data, more than you will find on the front pages of leading newspaper websites. The Associated Press has awarded 228 seats to Democrats and 139 to Republicans.  Of the remaining 68 seats, Democrats lead in 38 of them, and if they win those 38, they will finish with 266 seats, representing a gain of 49 seats.  Because apparently so many Republicans either stayed home or voted Democratic, the redistricting battle that the Republicans set off turned out to be disastrous for them.  If current trends hold up the North Carolina delegation will be will be 10-4 Democratic,  up from 7-7;  California will be 48-4 Democratic,  up from 39-12 (one seat was vacant); Texas will be 24-14 Republican, down from 25-15; and Florida, where four Republicans are hanging on by tiny margins, will remain at 20-8. Republican.  The Republicans have for the moment lost the richest and fastest-growing states in the Sunbelt.  That is a truly historic development.

In the key Senate races Democratic performances range from impressive to miraculous.  In Texas Ken Paxton, one of the worst candidates in American political history, who owed his nomination to President Trump, went down to James Talarico won by 55 percent to 43 percent. Roy Cooper won 59-39 in North Carolina over another hand-picked Trump opponent. Sherrod Brown won 50-45 over John Hustead in Ohio and Abdul Sayed won in Michigan by 7 percentage points.  Democrat Josh Turek won Iowa 51-46, and Adam Hamilton became the first Democratic Senator from Kansas since the New Deal days by the same margin.  Troy Jackson beat incumbent  Susan Collins in Maine, 54-46.  And most incredibly, Annie Andrews, the Democrat, beat Darline Graham, another Trump designee, 51-47, while in Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes [sic]. Annie Andrews is the first post-Dixiecrat Democrat ever to be elected to the Senate from South Carolina, and Colomb will be the same from Mississippi if his lead holds up.  (I'm afraid it won't, because all the absentee ballots remain to be counted, but we shall see.)  Since 1874 racial issues kept Mississippi and South Carolina firmly in the Jim Crow Democratic camp until the 1980s and firmly in the Republican camp since then.  Apparently those days are over.  Republican Julia Letlow won her race in Louisiana by only 2 percentage points, Jon Ossoff in Georgia won handily, and it looks like Alabama is the only remaining Republican bastion in the Deep South.  What this means to me is that 161 years after Appomattox, the Civil War is over, and we don't need the post-1983 interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and the racial gerrymandering that went with it after all.  No one will win a state election in South Carolina or Mississippi simply by being white again.  Hallelujah.

In the runup to this election Donald Trump did what Franklin Roosevelt had been unable to do in 1938: he successfully defeat popular Republicans, led by John Cornyn in Texas and Tom Tillis in North Carolina, who had stood up to him.  His candidates' disastrous performance should break his hold on the Republican Party and it will put some pressure on Republican hopefuls for 2028 to abandon him.  Democrats also gained one House seat and state legislature seats in Indiana, where Trump purged the Republican state legislature after it refused to execute a redistricting plan.  For the eleventh time in the last twelve national elections, the people of the US exercised their constitutional right to turn the rascals out--this time, it looks like, even more decisively than in 2008 and 2010.   I certainly can't predict what this means for the future. Donald Trump was never our only problem.  I have always said he is more of a symptom than a cause.   The task of restoring the bonds between our citizenry and our political elites has not yet begun, and our society seems at the mercy of forces beyond political control.  Still, there are signs of a very new era in yesterday's results, which exit polls will probably show to have been heavily generationally inspired.  That is a great comfort at my advanced age.

The Battle of the Sexes

 Few issues have taken up more public space in the last half century or so than relations between men and women.  These aren't the kinds of issues I usually discuss here, even though they have taken up plenty of space in my own life, too.  However, quite by accident, I just came across a long twitter thread on this subject that I found both hilarious and very revealing.  Let me say that I know where many of my favorite female thinkers, such as Nancy Friday and Camille Paglia, would stand on this exchange.  These issues are out of balance, in my opinion, and I hope eventually younger generations can make some progress.

https://x.com/MadelaineLucyH/status/2117306893282509251?a=ag9idhqZ6KA9DM4-OJc&s=20

A Marxist for the 21st century

 Marx valued private property in the hands of truly private individuals, e.g. peasants or artisans. Capitalism inevitably wants to do away with this. 

I met Steven Colatrella some months ago when he commented on one of my posts here to mention that he had read Politics and War.   He recognized our similarities. He is thirteen years my junior and has had a similarly checkered academic career.  Born in the New York area to a working class family, he was trained as a sociologist but now seems to see himself as a political scientist. He teaches at the University of Padua in Italy. He also happens to be a baseball fan.  He has done me the honor of reading several of my books, which we have corresponded about, and I decided to read one of his, a series of lectures that he gave about five years ago called Looking into the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism.  It is a demanding, highly theoretical work, using classic Marxist texts, including Das Kapital, to try to understand what has happened to our world in the last eighty years or so.  Rather than try to recapitulate its main points, I am going to talk about what I have learned from it. 

The tremendous insight from which so much can follow with which the book begins is a definition of capitalism.  For him, as for Marx apparently, it is not simply a system of private property or private enterprise.  The ideal type of capitalism, if you will, is a system in which holders of capital care about only one thing:  finding the maximum available return for their money, wherever it may be and whatever it costs.  This definition--whose understanding has become crucial in the last forty years or so--suggests that the great corporations of mid-twentieth century like General Motors, US Steel, General Mills, Alcoa, and the rest, were not purely capitalist, because they pursued wealth within a relatively narrow framework involving the production of one or a number of closely related products.  That meant, I feel certain, that their return on their investment was subject to very significant market fluctuations and that they might have to increase or decrease their production according to circumstances. It left plenty of room for technological innovation and increased productivity that could increase their profits.   It occurred to me as I read that we desperately need a word for that particular form of industrial capitalism, or for any kind of economic entity that focus on providing a particular good or service, especially for mass consumption.   If we had such a term we might start thinking about how to promote more of it, and less of the pure capitalism which now rules our world.  We managed that from the 1930s into the 1970s with high marginal tax rates and a lot of strict rules, both domestic and international, about the movement of capital.  Colatrella didn't try to come up with one, though, and I feel at a loss myself.  It's out there somewhere, I have no doubt.

The pure capitalism that Marx defined now rules our world.  That is no accident: it is the shareholder capitalism that was so influentially defined by Milton Friedman in my youth.  It is the capitalism practiced by the megabanks and hedge funds that dominate our economy, and it has taken over, in two senses, or elite educational system.  To take the most salient example: Harvard University on the one hand places its record-setting $60 billion endowment in the hands of hedge fund managers now so that they can use it for the sole purpose of maximizing profits--not Harvard's profits, but their own.  They have accounting tricks to inflate the impact of their management beyond its real benefit to the university, which is why they stopped beating the S & P index after the financial crash of 2008, and still don't.  And not coincidentally, the main educational function of Harvard College--and Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School as well--is to channel the smartest, most industrious young people in the world into high finance and into big tech, where more than half the graduating class goes every year.  Harvard, which in earlier incarnations trained clergymen, or teachers, or lawyers and doctors, now depends upon huge annual contributions to pay its enormous administrative staff, and those contributions come from the same huge financial institutions that the graduating class staffs.  Harvard is part of the team, and assigns correspondingly little value to really outstanding intellectual work, particularly in the humanities, in its faculty or among its students.  

It is these pure capitalists, of course, who re-oriented the US economy beginning in the 1970s, abandoning domestic industries because their products could be produced more cheaply and with higher profits overseas.  And some people noted at the time that many steel companies, for instance, were still making money when they were shut down--but their shareholders could make more money doing something else with their money, so they had to die, with horrifying effects on their communities that persist to this day.  Jack Welch became the new hero of the US economy by turning GE from a manufacturing giant into a new financial services company, to the acclaim of our economic press. A recent book, once reviewed here, showed how even Boeing, one of the gems of US manufacturing, began to value its stock price more than its engineers, with truly disastrous results.  The investors in companies now insist on steadily increasing earnings reports, undermining a key manufacturing principle: that there are times when you have to spend more money now, on new equipment or designs for instance, to make more money later.   And that is not all.  The financial crisis of 2008 occurred because thousands of bright young highly educated professionals used their ingenuity to devise new financial instruments that, as it turned out, served no useful purpose except to inflate their bonuses and their companies' profits.  AIG literally wrote insurance policies on the whole economy.  When it crashed, they could not of course pay off, but the government--a loyal ally of pure capitalism at least since Reagan, without a break--stepped in to bail them out with the help of the Federal Reserve, which demonstrated unprecedented largesse to prevent the kind of rethinking that the nation went through after 1929.   And the reach of mobile capital continues to increase, as private equity buys up whole health care complexes, nursing homes, and medical practices, all with disastrous results for medical personnel and patients--for everyone, in short, except itself.

Meanwhile, things have changed just as dramatically in Europe.  The catastrophe of the Second World War had led to a new economic ethos based on higher wages, high marginal tax rates (as in the US), and social welfare programs.  Having seen how economic collapse led to Fascism between the wars, two generations of Europeans were determined not to allow anything similar to happen again.  They built the European Union for similar reasons--but now its role has changed.  Colatrella stresses that the European Central Bank and the unelected commission of the EU have now become equally strong allies of pure international capitalism--what he calls "mobile capital"--and thus reacted to the crash with austerity requirements that have slowed economic growth and threaten social benefits.  European governments have not been able to cope with the impact of de-industrialization and mass immigration, with the result that political instability has become their hallmark, and right wing parties now have the largest followings of any political party in several major countries--not a majority, but a plurality nonetheless.  The same political impact of the triumph of pure capitalism has elected Donald Trump twice here in the United States.  (It is a sad feature of Looking Over the Abyss, written in the very early 2020s, that its author repeatedly refers to the Trump era as a thing of the past.)    

Colatrella spends a good chunk of the book trying to put contemporary social classes into a Marxist framework.  This analysis isn't easy going, but makes some very important points.  In the US, which he obviously follows very closely from across the ocean, he notes the rise of the educated professional class that has also been the focus of books like The Meritocracy Trap and We Have Never Been Woke, both reviewed here.  He regards them as the servant of the pure capitalists; I think that is a half truth.  This class, now the backbone of the Democratic Party, has its own world view and its own interests.  As Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap argued, it has been very good at structuring our institutions to benefit itself.  It has little or no sympathy for the traditional working class, which is why the majority of that working class now votes Republican while the professional class votes Democratic.  In a long chapter, Colatrella argues that the Green New Deal could be the key slogan of our era, partly because it might unite those two classes if it could be designed clearly to benefit the working class.  This turned out to be harder than he might have thought under the Biden interregnum.  That administration promoted electric vehicles against the opposition of the UAW, which knows that those vehicles don't require as much labor to make.  The professional class also dislikes and has put up guardrails against big infrastructure projects that disrupt communities, such as the California high speed rail project. It has resisted attempts to deal with our tremendous housing crisis here in the Boston area and elsewhere.  And now, of course, under the second Trump administration, all Biden's efforts to promote green energy have given way to new efforts to promote fossil fuel.  

Until we got to know each other I don't think Colatrella had encountered Strauss and Howe and their crisis theory.  That theory provides, of course, one way to understand how new generations have destroyed the great postwar political and economic system in Europe and the United States.  It predicted a great crisis that is far advanced in the United States and just hitting its climax, I think, in Europe, where Marie LePen may very well become the President of France next year. I am afraid that pure capitalist institutions--which I think now include big tech, which didn't loom as large five years ago as they do now--have become too powerful to overcome.  The business press now reports that the massive investments in AI and data centers don't seem likely to pay off, and could trigger a new crisis which in theory could put revolutionary new ideas on the table, but that one may simply lead to more bailouts.  Meanwhile, the next two years may see an even bigger breakdown in the US political system, as well as in Europe.   Colatrella is a kind of activist academic who felt he must try to point the way to a better future.  I have given up on that.  The world, I think, does need both of our types.  I'm very glad to have encountered him.

The anarchic administration

 About two weeks ago, I read Regime Change, the account by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan  Swann of Trump's first year in office. I did not take any notes, and my brain, as usual, has far too many demands upon it, and I don't think I can write a review that would do it justice now. I can however draw on the general impressions that it left me with that shed a lot of light on the horrible flaw at the heart of the Trump administration, one that will keep it from doing almost anything effectively for the next two years plus.

Our whole system of government is based upon respect for certain impartial principles embodied in our constitution and our laws.  They were stated very clearly in those documents.  They include the distribution of power among three different branches of government, the explicit affirmation of certain rights enjoyed by the people, and the limitations on the authority of prosecutors and police.  The constitution didn't lay out corresponding principles for international affairs, but the nation developed a set of  such principles during the twentieth century.  As embodied in Wilson's Fourteen Points and FDR's Atlantic Charter, they included respect for the sovereignty of nations, the renunciation of force except in self-defense, and the natural alliance among nations that shared our democratic values.  The commitment to these values at home and abroad cannot, of course, ensure that our government will always respect them.  The whole drama of US history revolves around the attempt to live up to the ideals that the founders bequeathed to us--something of which human beings are not consistently able to do.  They can however try.  The Trump Administration differs from any other in US history because Trump has no commitment whatever to any of these values, or to any legal, institutional or foreign policy traditions.  Like so many members of his and my generation, he believes that history started with him, and it's job is to make his imagined world come to life.  That is a world without law or impartial values, in which he can use all the power he has to reward friends, punish enemies, change the way the public thinks about important national issues, enrich himself and his family, seize power and resources in foreign countries, and, for reasons that I'm not sure anyone fully understands, openly favor Vladimir Putin and Russia over Volodomir Zelensky and Ukraine and leave every traditional American ally on its own.

Trump meanwhile is such an egomaniac that it is almost impossible to work for him.  He will not read or educate himself about anything, and he will not accept any advice that he is wrong on any issue.  Two things paralyze most of the people working for him.  The first is fear of losing his own favor.  Trump publicly ordered Pam Bondi to go more quickly about indicting the officials who he thought had treated him unfairly in the last eight years, and when she still didn't, he fired her. But the second--and this may be even more frightening--is the fear of MAGA influencers, with their hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, turning against them.  Influencer Laura Loomer can walk into the White House, tell Trump that high officials of his National Security Council staff are disloyal in some way, and count on him firing them, as Regime Change documents.  J.D. Vance is Trump's heir apparent, but Trump keeps enough speculation going about Marco Rubio as a possible alternative to keep Vance looking over his shoulder.  Nearly all his senior economic advisers, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, opposed elements of Trump's tariff policies, but they could not shake his certainty that tariffs would do what he thought they would.  He did have to back off from his trade war because of a threatened collapse in the financial markets, but he never really changed his mind.  Not surprisingly, in this frustrating environment, subordinates often take their anger out on each other, and the book details a number of out-of-control shouting matches among cabinet members and others.  It's another feature of this kind of environment that it encourages individuals to leak their side of the story to the press.  This book must have drawn on a great many of them.  Some of them will briefly oppose one of his ideas, but he can make them endorse almost anything, such as the idea of taking over the Gaza Strip, removing its population, and turning it into a Mediterranean resort.  

Trump has developed a remarkable political strategy, based upon money, which Haberman and Swan describe in some detail.  The key figures in it are two long-time Republican operatives, Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita, who ran the 2004 campaign along with Susie Wiles, now his chief of staff. The key to Trump's machine, of course, is money, the enormous sums that have poured into his campaign coffers from big oil, big tech, and anyone else who needs to stay in the good graces of the federal government, which is of course just about any major institution.  It is not clear whether Trump's new crypto-generated fortune is going into campaigns also.  Yet it seems that this strategy is about to meet with spectacular failure in the midterm elections.  The American people are so disgusted with the economic picture that they are going once again to exercise their fundamental right to remove the ruling party from power, certainly in the House and very likely in the Senate as well.  This will make ten out of the last eleven elections (beginning in 2006) in which either a house of Congress or the White House has changed hands.  And just today, the Washington Post reports that Trump is angry at these strategists because of the prospects of a big loss, making them vulnerable to intrigues against them by other ins the administration.  LaCivita and James Blair, a political director, have just been caught receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars for work on behalf of the pro-Russian Serbian government of the Serb territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Trump, in one of his frequent panics, announced on Truth Social nine days ago that LaCivita and Blair "do not work for me, other than as outside consultants."  Staffers are speculating that Wiles might give up her position after the midterms, and Stephen Miller, housing official Bill Pulte (the father of the failed mortgage fraud cases against Adam Schiff and Letitia James), and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin top contenders to replace her.  Trump apparently chose the now-departed Katie Zacharia as his new press secretary without consulting Wiles.  This is the kind of medieval court politics that inevitably dominates an organization run by a hopeless narcissist with no commitment to any higher goals or principles and no respect for actual facts.

Based on Haberman and Swan's book, there is only one kind of project that really commands Trump's sustained attention: the destruction or remodeling of old buildings and monuments and the erection of new ones.  Here, too, he has created his own playbook.  He destroyed the old East Wing of the White House without even informing Congress, using multi-million dollar donations from businessmen who depend on government cooperation to pay for its reconstruction.  He has called French President Emmanuel Macron to compare the dimensions of his planned Triumphal Arch across Memorial Bridge to the one in Paris.  He kills time in the Oval Office showing almost any visitor plans for these projects.  Having left his mark on New York and Atlantic City, he is determined to do the same in Washington, and this time he doesn't have to borrow the money from banks.  The Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were authorized in 1911 and 1934 by presidents (Taft and Franklin Roosevelt) who wanted to commemorate the founding giants of their own political parties. Trump won't glorify anyone but himself.

I found only one moment in the whole book in which Trump did anything somewhat admirable.  On September 27, 2025, Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff, Trump's special envoys who have combined Middle East diplomacy with big-time private deal-making, had reached a cease-fire agreement on Gaza, but they had warned Susie Wiles that Netanyahu, who functions as another one of Trump's major foreign policy advisers, would call Trump to try to back out of it.  When he did, Trump put them on the call as well, and at least one of them apparently shared what he heard with the authors.  I quote:

          "Bellowing, Trump told Netanyahu he was sick of his antics. I've done everything to protect you.  You better fucking go along with this.  It's been going on for too fucking long. Everybody's sick of you, Bibi, Trump said.  All the Jews are sick of you.  Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you, Trump added, referring to Kushner and Witkoff.  You can't back out of this.  I'm the best friend Israel ever had.  everybody hates you, and I've stood by you, he continued to shout. I'm telling you, Trump yelled, this is a great deal for Israel."

          Netanyahu caved in.  Of course, the deal has turned out to be a sham: Israel has continued destroying buildings of all kinds in Gaza and has killed 1,505 Palestinians according to the Gaza Health Ministry since the deal was reached, and refuses to withdraw from Gaza.  Israeli government figures constantly admit their plans to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West bank. That perhaps shows the limits of what Trump's diplomacy can do: it can't make Putin or Netanyahu abandon their imperialist dreams and their expansionist wars, but it can get Netanyahu, at least, to pretend to step back once in a while.

         Trump has evidently lost whatever grip he had on the  American people eighteen months ago.  Yesterday Nate Silver's projections gave the Democrats a 74.6 percent chance of gaining control of the Senate, most likely by a 52-48 margin, and a 93.5 percent chance of winning the House, with a projected majority of 239-196.  Since 1840 a weak economy has invariably punished the party in power at the polls, and 2026 will be no exception.  I don't know if this will do anything to restore functioning democracy in the United States.  The Democrats are planning investigations of massive financial irregularities inside the Trump White House and Administration, and there could well be another round of impeachment.  That will continue the endless struggle between the elites of the two parties, which in my opinion the bulk of the population is sick of.  Meanwhile, more than 50 years of ceaseless attacks on our institutions and founding principles, from both sides of the aisle, have taken their toll.  We still have a lot of inspiring history upon which to draw, but I do now know if our political class still cares or knows enough about it to begin restoring a sense of common purpose and a commitment to greater ideals to our political life.