This is so appalling, words fail me. It seems to be an open admission by the trump administration that the practices of the Jim Crow South are now completely acceptable and unaccountable. The white supremacy of the government approaches apartheid era South Africa.
And notice that one of the schools is in Michigan.
Inside school investigations frozen under Trump: Racial slurs, sexual harassment and more
Here is a brilliant exposition of the power of patient lies and relabeling to mask ugly truths about our history. It retells the migration of language from "slaveholders rebellion" to "civil war". And it shows a direct parallel with Trump’s lies about January 6. The narrative matters!
It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War.’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/civil-war-slaveholders-rebellion-slavery.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2VA.1Mjb.x3vp663__E0c&smid=nytcore-android-share
The MAGA Movement is intent on silencing authentic, responsible historiography of America’s past. This has been going on at least since DeSantis was elected governor of Florida (indeed, its roots go much farther back in the conservative movement). The latest salvo is the Trump Administration’s attacks on the Smithsonian Institution. This is childish stuff, and it does not bode well for our national well-being. As the well-known inscription on the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan says, “In darkness dwells the people which knows its annals not.”*
Fortunately, there are serious grown-ups who continue to do fine and important work to expand the American annals. I’m very happy today to draw attention to an excellent example, by our friend and colleague Kim Clarke, whose The Last Full Measure: An American Family and How the United States Brought Home the Dead of World War II has just been published. The book is an informative and moving account of a forgotten episode in US history. Clarke is an outstanding researcher and writer, and she weaves together a thorough sociopolitical history with a history of her own family.
At the center of the story is her grandfather, Delbert Trueman, who, very sadly, was killed on his first combat mission, when the B24 bomber on which he served as a gunner was shot down over Austria. The book follows Delbert from his early life to this moment of supreme sacrifice, and on to the journey his remains made — from being buried by German soldiers, to being moved after the war and reinterred in the temporary American military cemetery at St. Avold, to his finally being brought home to Indiana years after the war ended. His postmortem journey was typical of those Americans who gave their lives in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.
Delbert’s story is not the only one recounted — indeed, much of the book proceeds through the biographies of individuals who were involved in the complex process of returning or burying the dead. We learn about Colonel Robert Harbold, who organized the entire massive effort to deal with the dead; about Lt. Michihiko Hayashida, who with his Japanese-Americam family was sent to an internment camp but who then served in the American Graves Registration Service identifying and relocating the dead; about Karl Kasca, a mortician who dealt with the remains of thousands of the deceased. We learn about the other members of Delbert’s crew and their destinies. And we learn about Kim Clarke’s own family and their part in the history of this country that we share.
We learn about the horrors of war: the terrible disfigurements that made identification of the dead so difficult. Clarke writes:
American soldiers died hiding behind trees, in ditches, under rubble. And that instinct—the instinct to survive—became, in death, an obstacle to being found.
In the end, I came away with the feeling that it was nothing short of a miracle — an organized miracle — that so many of the dead were found and identified.
The US was the only nation to return its dead, and the move was not without controversy. Some thought that bodies should be left in peace, some had religious objections, some thought the funds would be better utilized to help the families of the dead or those who had returned from the war wounded. These debates played out in the press and in Congress, and each family had to make its own decision. Ultimately, about 60 percent decided to bring their loved ones back to th US.
The first overwhelming impression I have from this book is of the care, the dignity, the responsibility, and the lengths to which those charged with recovery went about their work:
There was an abiding air of deference as troops uncovered remains. They had to pay close attention to detail as bodies—damaged, decomposed—were lifted from the earth. There could be no overlooking anything, because accurately identifying a soldier’s body meant everything. Army regulations made it clear: “Graves registration is not an easy task at best. It is not a task to which troops are assigned for disciplinary purposes. Rather it is one for which the highest type of military personnel should be chosen.”
Each body returned to the US was accompanied by an escort, and both escort and escorted were referred to as “passengers,” had tickets, and were treated with respect. These were, in other words, persons on their way to their final resting places.
The second overwhelming impression is of individual American citizens meeting the moment and doing what they knew was needed, whether that was the warriors like Delbert Trueman and his fellow crewmen, doing their level, courageous best in the heat and terror of battle, or those who day after day after day faced the gruesome task of location, identity and transport of the mangled and decomposing dead, not just so they had not died in vain, but to ensure that they, as fellow servicemen and citizens, were treated with all of the dignity they deserved. In brief, real, serious adults doing the work of real, serious adults. And their work adds a layer of meaning to our founding phrase, all men are created equal.
Such sensibilities are very far from where we are now, when we have a Secretary of Defense obsessed with testosterone levels and a president so willfully oblivious of the realities of war that he constantly flip-flops and temporizes when American — and Iranian — lives are at stake. Kim Clarke has done us a service, not only in extending America’s annals, but in giving us one more reminder of how we Americans did brave things in the face of danger and difficulty.
And, perhaps we can say that we still are that people. We’ve seen it in the courage of Minnesota and Illinois citizens, in the steadfastness of election workers in the face of illegitimate pressure, in the journalists who continue to probe for truth, in the students who risk the wrath of their universities and their government when they protest, in the judges of all political persuasions who uphold the law and the Constitution. We, too, can and must carry forward the legacy of those who have gone before.
*The statement was written by U-M history professor Ulrich B. Phillips in 1923, expressly for the facade of the Clements. It stands in conversation with another statement by Phillips composed for the facade, “Tradition fades but the written record remains ever fresh”
When I was in junior high and high school I was, believe it or not, quite conservative. I devoured National Review, I was a fan of William F. Buckley, even more of Garry Wills and Jeffrey Hart, and I campaigned for Ronald Reagan in the 1976 primary campaign, before I was eligible to vote. Perhaps even more than conservatism, I was enraptured with political history — and I remember being immersed in Theodore H. White’s series of books about presidential elections from 1960 to 1972.
But, my most prominent political memories from that period are of the Watergate hearings, and the eventual resignation of Richard Nixon. School got in the way, but I watched as much as I could. I was absorbed and tracked everything. And a highlight of my young life was when, while at a summer debate institute in 1974 at Georgetown U in D.C., friends and I visited my Congressman, Guy Vander Jagt, who while we were visiting had to take a call from his friend John Erlichmann (Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Advisor and the creator of “The Plumbers,” who were the operatives at the heart of the scandal). It’s possible that Erlichmann could have been calling about his conviction in the Pentagon Papers case, which came down on July 12 of that year — but I don’t really recall the timing. Let’s just say that as a 16-year-old, I thought I was at the heart of the political universe!
Now I think the fact that a kid with strong ideological leanings could at that time watch Congressional hearings about such a monumental matter and come away nonetheless with a genuine understanding of it and a sense that “things had been done right,” at least mostly — well, that’s not where we are now, to say the least.
So, please pardon this nostalgia, which has turned out longer than I expected, as nostalgia does. I’m leading up to this: in that great film about Watergate, All the President’s Men, there’s a critical scene in which journalist Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) meets informant “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook) in a parking garage. Woodward is focused on whether or not certain information had been leaked by the White House. The dialogue (a bit abridged) goes like this:
Woodward: Segretti told me and Bernstein that…
Deep Throat (interrupting): Don’t concentrate on Segretti. You’ll miss the overall.
Woodward: The letter that destroyed the Muskie campaign… did that come from inside the White House?
Deep Throat: You’re missing the overall.
Woodward: What overall?
. . . .
Deep Throat: The people behind all of this were frightened of Muskie, and that’s what got him destroyed. They wanted to run against McGovern. Look who they’re running against. They bugged offices, they followed people, planted false press leaks, passed fake letters… they canceled Democratic campaign rallies, they investigated Democratic private lives, they planted spies, they stole documents… and now don’t tell me that all of this was the work of one Donald Segretti.
The point is that what was unfolding was a comprehensive, White-House-driven attempt to use illegal interference to subvert Americans’ electoral rights. Fortunately, in sharp contrast to today’s Republican Congress and members of the Administration, Nixon confronted a genuinely independent and rigorous press, courageous members of both parties, and members of his own Administration who had real integrity: journalists like Woodward and Bernstein; special prosecutors like Archibald Cox; cabinet secretaries who refused to do the illegal, irresponsible, and dishonest, like Elliott Richardson; staff members like John Dean who testified truthfully before the Congressional committees. So the effort was stopped, not in time to protect the 1972 election — Nixon would indeed have had a much harder time against Muskie — but in time to bring the president and others to justice (or at least some justice) and to bring about new safeguards to protect election integrity and to control presidential power, which have largely held sway . . . until now.
So last night, Trump gave an address about election integrity, repackaging and retreading old lies about foreign election interference, about the problems with mail-in ballots, about issues with voting machines.
It is all laughable stuff, easily debunked, not defensible in court, and so on.
But let’s not miss the overall.
What Trump and Company are doing is playing for the midterms and for the 2028 election. They know that none of what they are saying is defensible (well, maybe Donald thinks it is, if Donald actually thinks). But that’s not the point. The point is to “flood the zone” with ever-increasing noise about voter fraud in order to lay a foundation for drastic action: ICE and FBI at the polls, seizing ballots, attempting to close polling sites, launching investigations and demanding that Congress not certify elections in districts that are under investigation. They want federal control — i.e., their control — of the 2028 election, and if they can warp the midterms, a re-elected Republican Congress will give it to them.
These threats in themselves are designed to scare people away from the polls, and they are designed to inure reasonable people to the draconian measures Trump et al. are planning, while also ensuring Trump’s base that their cause is righteous (read, heinous).
Virtually all of the Trump Administration and its allies are dedicated to this path. Chuck Grassley’s deceitful introduction of Todd Blanche at his confirmation hearing is Exhibit One, supplemented by the fawning of so many Republican committee members. (Fortunately, Thom Tillis and John Cornyn might give us a shot at a just outcome.) Ditto for Exhibit Two, the conformation hearing for Jay Clayton as head of National Security. Exhibit Three: Markwayne Mullin’s letters to four states today, saying, without any details, that DHS has identified hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on voting rolls (apparently this is Plan B, following on the Administration’s losses in court in its efforts to require states to submit voter rolls). Exhibit Four: the neutering of the Washington Post, Musk’s transformation of Twitter/X into a swamp of disinformation and racist manipulation, and the ongoing effort by the Ellisons to take over huge swaths of the nation’s communications channels.
The exhibits just pile up: sending the FBI to Georgia to seize ballots (clearly illegal), the demand for voter rolls (also illegal), the reported threat by Trump to shut down the government if the SAVE act is not passed — all of this is preparation for what would essentially be a coup against the electorate.
And the Trump cabal has learned the lessons of Watergate: control the media; poison the courts; marginalize Congress; fill the Administration ranks with sycophants.
So, expect a lot of this over the next few months and beyond.
There are some hopeful signs. Trump’s numbers are abysmal. Numerous organizations — even the Democratic Party, for once — are organizing for the fight ahead, developing action plans for scores of different stunts that the Administration might pull, such as those listed above and more. And, the slumbering news media seem to be waking up to reality — not just MSNOW and influencers like Robert Reich, Joyce Vance, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, etc. ABC, NBC and CNN refused to broadcast the speech, CBS did comprehensive fact-checking, and the New York Times is finally with some regularity calling things what they really are.
But make no mistake, this is a national emergency, and we must all be alert to the overall reality.
Trump has thin skin and will TACO on lots of issues — but not this. It is for him existential, as it is for the whole Project 2025 pack.
There will be extreme and outrageous action of sorts we haven’t yet seen. And chaos and turmoil is part of the plan. This is an orchestrated effort, and the brief history of Trump 2.0 shows us that we cannot imagine the bottom to which they will go.
So we must be prepared to meet it: protect the election, gain the Congress, and — to paraphrase William F. Buckley’s motto for Natonal Review, “stand athwart Trumpist history yelling ‘Stop!'”
Corruption. From the Latin corrumpere, which meant “to destroy, spoil, ruin, break to pieces” — and by extension, “to seduce or bribe.” When we say “corruption,” we of course think of things like graft, bribery, ill-gotten gains, misuse of power; we also think of the rotting of organic matter, the inevitable return of living matter to dust.
I tried to begin this post with a list of Donald Trump’s corrupt activities in this term and his first — but the list would take up far more space than is reasonable. If you’re interested, here is ChatGPT’s response to my request that it give an overview of accusations. This is a very high level summary — but the upshot is that in many ways, the $2.2B he and his family have raked in since January 2025, a mere 18 months ago, is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Through rank misuse of power, insider dealing of all sorts, bribery of friends and foes alike to line his coffers in order to get what they want, he has thoroughly monetized the American presidency. Moreover, if we follow the Latin, through seduction and bribery he has corrupted — rotted — the American government.
And the thing is, Trump’s corruption is sui generis. We have truly not seen the like before; we have not seen this kind of rotting and decay at the very head before.
To be sure there have been significant corruptions of presidential administrations in the past. Prominent with respect to fiduciary corruption — graft — the administrations of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding typically top the list. With respect to abuse of power, it’s hard to surpass Richard Nixon — until now.
In the Grant and Harding cases, the corruption did not extend from the very top, down. In the Grant Administration, the Whiskey Ring Scandal involved a nationwide conspiracy of distillers, distributors, and Treasury officials to steal millions by evading federal liquor taxes; the Indian Ring Scandal saw Interior Department officials and traders overcharging Native American agencies and diverting government supplies intended for tribes. All despicable. But Grant himself, scholars widely agree, may have been guilty of poor judgment in appointments and of inattentiveness to things going on around him, but he himself was never implicated, and as suspicions emerged, he aggressively pursued investigations.
In the Harding Administration, similarly, the corruption swirled around the White House, but there is little evidence that Harding himself personally benefitted or played an active role. The most infamous scandal, Teapot Dome, involved the Secretary of the Interior awarding non-bid contracts (sound familiar?) in exchange for kickbacks. Again, Harding’s unsound judgment, poor leadership, and ineffective management were key — but the rot did not, as far as has been determined, extend to the president himself and was not driven by him. Harding died in office, but his successor, Calvin Coolidge, pursued investigations of Teapot Dome and other scandals.
Nixon is a different story; he was himself intent on maintaining power, as became clear after the Watergate hearings asked again and again, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” What initially might have looked like some political operatives going rogue was ultimately shown to have its roots with the president himself, despite his efforts to maintain “plausible deniability.” Even at that, though, Nixon’s motive was not pecuniary; his offense was not graft but the abuse of the power of the presidency. And even at that — not to defend Nixon, but simply to make the comparison — he did not come close to warping the policies and actions of the United States to the degree that Trump has, even for his own political gain. Just imagine how Trump might have handled the rapprochement with China, in comparison with Nixon.
No, Trump stands on his own. He gives us every form of corruption. Specifically, he gives us two forms of Constitutional corruption: (1) the pecuniary corruption against which the emoluments clauses are explicitly directed (see this fine overview of the clauses by the Brennan Center), and (2) the corruption entailed by his unwillingness to uphold his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
And he initiates this corruption himself, for his own gain — political, legal, and monetary.
But, it is even worse than that: Trump sought the presidency for the purpose of his own gain and he utilizes the office as his right and means to obtain that gain. In Trump 1.0, he was held in check to some extent; he has made sure that did not happen in this term.
And of course, we should not be surprised, because corruption has always been Trump’s mode of doing business, following in his father’s footsteps. Lie, cheat, steal and destroy anything that stands in your way. When called to account in the courts or elsewhere, delay, delay, delay through any means necessary.
When the media dress this up as Trump’s “transactional approach” to everything, they do us a great disservice — perhaps yet more evidence of his corrupting influence, or of the corruption in our institutions that has allowed him to succeed. The truth is, his actions are by nature criminal, by design both opposed to and parasitic upon the law and the constitution of a decent people. (See Robert Reich’s excellent take on how he gets away with it here.)
The Constitution provides the remedy for Constitutional corruption: impeachment. In Nixon’s case, there was bi-partisan pushback, leading to Nixon’s resignation when it became clear that impeachment was coming. The idea that our current Republican Congress would push back on Trump is laughable. The GOP is a festering corpse of a party, capable only of zombie action.
One etymology of the name “Donald” is that it comes from Old Irish domnall, which means “world ruler.” One etymology of the name “Trump” is that it comes from the Middle High German term trumpe, meaning “trumpet” — and it fairly early on referred to a loud, boastful, attention-seeking person, one who, we might say, “toots his own horn.” So there you have in a nutshell Donald Trump: a boastful, attention-seeking, would-be world ruler (already a world-ruler in his own mind, no doubt). So much for his nominal inheritance.
His spiritual inheritance, his character, and his behavior suggest a different name: Corruption, as outlined at the top. Surely, Donald, thy real name, thy name as inscribed in the scrolls of eternity, is Corruption.
Robert Reich has a good substack on reforms to undertake to fix our government. He invites other ideas — please submit them!
The extremest white suprematist far right “Patriot Front” blots 4th of July events in Washington DC …
Neo-fascist group Patriot Front parades Confederate flag in Washington DC on Fourth of July
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/neo-fascist-patriot-front-washington-dc
Here is a brilliant discussion by Brian Stevenson of how America should move forward in confronting its history of slavery and racism with honesty and compassion … it is brilliant and worth watching on the 4th of July …
Photo of Lincoln’s First Inauguration
Well, here we are. We are sad, we are afraid, we are determined, we are hopeful, and we do not know what the future holds. But, here we are, and we have good reasons to mark this occasion.
Who we are has been a theme of my recent posts, but today I want to take a look at what we are, because that also bears on where we are and where we go.
Today, we have been “here” for 250 years — meaning that 250 years ago today we announced that we were to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitled us, as the Declaration says.
Of course, we have been “here” for longer than that, in so many ways. I am writing this in New York City, the land of the Munsee Lenape, who inhabited what is now Manhattan Island for many generations before the arrival of Dutch settlers in 1624, before the English took over in 1664, before the arrival of Europeans in Florida in 1565, in North Carolina in 1587, in Virginia in 1607, in Massachusetts in 1620. Before the introduction of slavery in 1619.
But we have been here as a state for 250 years, today. Not, in political-science terms, a nation-state, because we were already nationally and ethnically diverse, but a civic state, a constitutional state, as the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution all made clear.
So now, starting now, where does the state of the United States go? Of course there are many matters of activism, politics, elections, and governance that we will need to address in the days and weeks ahead. But in broad terms, where?
We are concerned and afraid. We are afraid that, as a state, we are losing our soul, our founding ideals and principles, our raison d’etre, our constitution, i.e., that which constitutes us. We are afraid that as a state, we are becoming a mere simulacrum, a mere parody, of our stated and unstated principles.
And, we are afraid of our divisions, our polarization, our seemingly intractable separations. We do not see how we can come together. Talk of actual dissolution of the Republic and of secession from the Republic has been on the rise, and while it might largely be rhetorical, it is telling nonetheless.
There is too much here to unpack in one post, so I hope to do more in the future. But let’s start today on the eve of the greatest rupture in our history — the eve of the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address.
At the time of his inauguration, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union — all acting on the basis that a Lincoln presidency constituted a grave threat to their fundamental interest, their interest in slavery.
In his address, Lincoln chooses not to recognize this situation; he ignores secession and acts like a parent deciding to ignore an unruly child. He talks as if secession is a possibility but leaves the door completely open for those states to reverse their decisions. And one of the reasons for this is that he viewed the idea of secession as having no standing either under the constitution or under what we might refer to as natural law.
Lincoln does two important things in the address: he constructs a powerful legal brief concerning the impossibility of legitimating secession, and he appeals to larger forces — friendship, history, and memory among them — that unite the American state.
The legal brief consists of three arguments:
The other main point can be best represented by Lincoln’s famous concluding paragraph, beginning with the poignant “I am loath to close” — as if continuing to talk to the people could stave off the inevitable — and continuing:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
So, that is Lincoln’s gloss, shall we say, on what happened 250 years ago today. We know what came next, and how it constituted a second revolution.
Today, the larger issue that we face is the first that I mentioned above, the fear that we will lose our principles, our constitution. And we are in the historically unique situation that we face that fear because of the nature of the enemy to the constitution, the enemy to the state. Lincoln confronted the illegal secession of a third of the Republic. We face a government that is dead set on destroying the state as it has been, destroying our Constitution as well as our unwritten constitution.
We often think of “state” as meaning the government. But the government is not the state, it is not us. It is no more than the agent of the state. Louis XIV might have stated the fundamental formula of an undemocratic monarchy when he said, “L’Etat c’est moi,” a perfect statement also of Tump’s mindset. But the formula of our democratic republic is “we the people” are the state. What happened in 1776 is that we the people assumed our separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.
Now we the people, the American state, is under assault by those whose duty is to protect it. The massive efforts to disenfranchise millions of Americans in order to attain tyrannical power is example number one.
So, it is our duty to protect the American state. Get out and protest. Work locally and nationally to protect our elections. We do not know what the next few months will hold, but we must understand what is at stake and do what it takes — and like our forebears “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Happy 250, America!
