Editor’s note: Like every edition, today’s goes out to everyone on my list. That includes subscribers and people who read for free. I’m sending it to everyone because I believe I should. This is a newsletter about democracy and the common good, after all. I can’t be exclusive.

That said, I can’t do this alone. I need the good people who read for free to recognize the work that I’m doing and support it in any way they can, whether that’s a subscription or a tip. The election drained some of my faith in democracy, but I still have faith in good people.

I hope you will join us today. Thanks! –JS

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It’s Friday, and if you’re like me, you’re tired. Not only is there an endless stream of chaos and dysfunction coming out of the White House, most of it is illegal, illiberal, destructive and immoral.

It’s the fatigue itself, in addition to the chaos and dysfunction, that has me remembering an old clip featuring Anand Giridharadas. The writer and frequent MSNBC guest said something back in October, before the election, that he could not have known was so absolutely prescient. (Then again, maybe he did know. He’s very good at what he does.)

Here’s what Giridharadas said on “Morning Joe” on October 17, 2024:

“I think what’s really important now is for people across this country who may not be diehard for Kamala Harris or diehard for Donald Trump, but who love the country, who have been blessed by the many gifts of this country to say this country … has given you whatever it’s given you because of institutions – institutions that you take for granted, prospects of a peaceful transfer of power that you take for granted so you can go live your life. You can go start that restaurant. You can go do that job. You can go drive your kid to that college.

“You can do all those things in a way that you cannot in Somalia because the institutions are just working in the background. You don’t even have to think about them very often. You have to vote every so often and then they work. What is at stake is you possibly not being able to do all those things you’ve done all your life, not be able to chase your dreams, not be able to make your plans, because what works in the background is not going to be working in the background.

“Politics, government, persecution would become your life. This would become the full drama of our country. That’s what happens in these countries that go in that illiberal, unconstitutional direction.

“And what they are proposing is not just, you know, an abstraction of fascism. It is a kind of political project where politics would eat our dreams, eat your plans, and I don’t think most Americans want that.”

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Five months later, it would be difficult to pick just one example of what Giridharadas was talking about, which is the collapse of democratic institutions and how their failure makes planning and dreaming and building toward a future worth living impossible for normal people.

Benjamin Wittes made a partial list:

• “humiliating the president of an ally [Volodymyr Zelensky] under stress in the Oval Office with the cameras rolling”;
• “pulling back from overseas public health work [by the US Agency for International Aid] as children are dying of Ebola”;
• “pulling back from domestic public health work [at the Centers for Disease Control] while bird flu is decimating livestock”;
• “dismantling the federal government, agency by agency”;
• an “FBI and Justice Department being overtly politicized by clowns wielding flamethrowers, as is the military.”

But perhaps the best evidence underscoring Giridharadas’ thesis is the one that neither he nor anyone could not have foreseen, which is the handing over of constitutional authority by the Congress to an unelected and unaccountable, private and deranged individual. 

Or, as this CNN headline put it:

“Republicans push Musk to let Congress vote on DOGE cuts.”

Elon Musk held a meeting with Senate Republicans this week, in which he informed them of efforts by the “Department of Government Efficiency.” According to the Post, the billionaire owner of Twitter and SpaceX told them “in a closed-door lunch that he wanted to set up a direct line for [the Republican senators] when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” 

“Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would ‘create a system where members of Congress can call some central group’ to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.”

“This whole exchange is bonkers,” wrote Heather Cox Richardson. “The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: ‘How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?’”

In a previous edition of the Editorial Board, I argued that Trump was robbing the Congress of its constitutional authority by freezing, cancelling and otherwise impeding funds that had been appropriated and signed into law. I see now that assessment was premature.

As this new reporting reveals, it was not a robbery but instead a forfeiture by the congressional Republicans. They have relinquished their power, voluntarily, to a despot who does not and will never understand the whole point of democracy, and who is burning down the institutions – the National Weather Service, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Education, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, to name four – that, as Giridharadas said, used to work in the background. Under Donald Trump, they no longer can.

As Giridharadas said:

“Politics, government, persecution would become your life.”

Nearly everything that makes the United States a constitutional republic – namely, the foundational structures that were put in place in the very beginning according to which powers are separated among the three branches of the government – is now going through the hands of a “ketamine-fueled jester,” as a French politician put it, a man who may or may not listen, as he’s accountable nowhere and to no one.

The White House is aware that it’s a bad idea for a “ketamine-fueled jester” to be seen as having power that’s greater than or equal to the sum total of all the members of the United States Congress. That’s why the president held a made-for-TV Cabinet meeting yesterday, during which he reminded secretaries that they, and only they, have the legal and constitutional authority over staffing in their departments. 

Everything was going fine until Trump said: “We want [the Cabinet secretaries] to keep the good people. So we’re gonna be watching them. And Elon and the group are gonna be watching them. And if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

The chaos keeps coming. 

The administration says it’s going to impose tariffs on Mexico. Then it doesn’t. It says it’s going to impose tariffs on Canada. Then it doesn’t. (Any business that does any kind of international trade cannot plan anything with uncertainty like this.) Moreover, the administration says it’s going to issue an executive order to shut down the Education Department. Then it doesn’t. It fires people who are essential to running the country. Then it tries to bring them back on the job. Hell, it fires people for doing what the administration told them to do!

The whiplash is brutal. It is everlasting. 

And it’s in addition to the fact that inflation is pushing the cost of groceries up and up. (The extortionate price of a dozen eggs is due entirely to the spread of avian flu, a disease that some officials at the US Department of Health and Human Service have said should be allowed to run its course, even though it kills about 90 percent of infected birds. We could all be nostalgic for $10 eggs before long!)

This is the criminal politics of a state on the road to failure.

“What they are proposing is not just, you know, an abstraction of fascism,” Anand Giridharadas said in October. “It is a kind of political project where politics would eat our dreams, eat your plans.”

It’s no longer a proposal. 

It’s reality now.