Proteins, Factories, and Wicked Solutions

Part 3- But What is AI Good For?

(Go to Part Two)

There are many frames and metaphors to help us understand our AI age. But one comes up especially often, because it is useful, and perhaps even a bit true: the Golem of Jewish lore. The most famous golem is the Golem of Prague, a magical defender of Jews in the hostile world of European gentiles. But that was far from the only golem in Jewish legends.

The golem was often a trustworthy and powerful servant in traditional Jewish stories — but only when in the hands of a wise rabbi. To create a golem proved a rabbi’s mastery over Kabbalah, a mystical interpretation of Jewish tradition. It was esoteric and complex to create this magical servant of mud and stone. It was brought to life with sacred words on a scroll pressed into the mud of its forehead. With that, the inanimate mud became person-like and powerful. That it echoed life being granted to the clay Adam was no coincidence. These were deep and even dangerous powers to call on, even for a wise rabbi.

You’re probably seeing where this is going.

Mostly a golem was created to do difficult or dangerous tasks, the kind of things we fleshy humans aren’t good at. This is because we are too weak, too slow, or inconveniently too mortal for the work at hand.

The rabbi activated the golem to protect the Jewish community in times of danger, or use it when a task was simply too onerous for people to do. The golem could solve problems that were not, per se, impossible to solve without supernatural help, but were a lot easier with a giant clay dude who could do the literal and figurative heavy lifting. They could redirect rivers, move great stones with ease. They were both more and less than the humans who created and controlled them, able to do amazing things, but also tricky to manage.

When a golem wasn’t needed, the rabbi put it to rest, which was the fate of the Golem of Prague. The rabbi switched off his creation by removing the magic scroll he had pressed into the forehead of the clay man.

Our Servants, Ourselves

The parallels with our AIs are not subtle.

If the golem was not well managed, it could become a violent horror, ripping up anything in its path mindlessly. The metaphors for technology aside, what makes the golem itself such a useful idea for talking about AI is how human shaped it is. Both literally, and in its design as the ultimate desirable servant. The people of Prague mistook the golem for a man, and we mistake AI for a human-like mind.

Eventually, the rabbis put the golems away forever, but they had managed to do useful things that made life easier for the community. At least, sometimes. Sometimes, the golems got out of hand.

It is unlikely that we’re going to put our new AI golem away any time soon, but it seems possible that after this historical moment of collective madness, we will find a good niche for it. Because our AI golems are very good at doing some important things humans are naturally bad at, and don’t enjoy doing anyway.

Folding Proteins for Fun and Profit

Alphafold 3 logo

Perhaps the originally famous example of our AI golem surpassing our human abilities is Alphafold, Google’s protein folding AI. After throwing many technological tools at the problem of predicting how proteins would shape themselves in many circumstances, Google’s specialist AI was able to predict folding patterns in roughly 2/3rds of cases. Alphafold is very cool, and could be an amazing tool for technology and health one day. Understanding protein folding has implications in understanding disease processes and drug discovery, among other things.

If this seems like a hand-wavy explanation of Alphafold, it’s because I’m waving my hands wildly. I don’t understand that much about Alphafold — which is also my point. Good and useful AI tends to be specialized to do things humans are bad at. We are not good golems, either in terms of being able to do very difficult and heavy tasks, or paying complete attention to complex (and boringly repetitive) systems. That’s just not how human attention works.

One of our best Golem-shaped jobs is dealing with turbulence. If you’ve dealt with physics in a practical application, anything from weather prediction to precision manufacturing, you know that turbulence is a terrible and crafty enemy. It can become impossible to calculate or predict. Often by the time turbulent problems are perceivable by humans or even normal control systems, you’re already in trouble. But an application-specific AI, in, for instance, a factory, can detect the beginning of a component failure below both human and even normal programatic detection.

A well-trained bespoke AI can catch the whine of trouble before the human-detectable turbulence starts. This is because it has essentially “listened” to how the system works so deeply over time. That’s its whole existence. It’s a golem doing the one or two tasks for which it has been “brought to life” to do. It thrives with the huge data sets that defeat human attention. Instead of a man shaped magical mud being, it’s a listener, shaped by data, tirelessly listening for the whine of trouble in the system that is its whole universe.

Similarly, the giant datasets of NOAA and NASA could take a thousand human life years to comb through to find everything you need to accurately predict a hurricane season, or the transit of the distant exoplanet in front of its sun.

The trajectories and interactions of the space junk enveloping Earth are dangerously out of reach of human calculation – but maybe not with AI. The thousands of cycles of an Amazon cloud server hosting a learning model that gets just close enough to modeling how the stochastic processes of weather and space are likely to work will never be human readable.

That third-of-the-time-wrong quality of Alphafold is kind of emblematic of how AI is mostly, statistically right, in specific applications with a lot of data. But it’s no divine oracle, fated to always tell the truth. If you know that, it’s often close enough for engineering, or figuring out what part of a system to concentrate human resources next. AI is not smart or creative (in human terms), but it also doesn’t quit until it gets turned off.

Skynet, But for Outsourcing

AI can help us a lot with doing things that humans aren’t good at. At times a person can pair up with an AI application and fill in each other’s weaknesses – the AI can deliver options, the human can pick the good one. Sometimes an AI will offer you something no person could have thought of, sometimes that solution or data is a perfect fit; the intractable, unexplainable, wicked solution. But the AI doesn’t know it has done that, because an AI doesn’t know in the way we think of as knowing.

There’s a form of chess that emerged out of computers becoming better than humans at this cerebral hobby, like IBM’s Deep Blue. It’s called cyborg, or centaur, chess, in which both players are using a chess AI as well as their own brains to play. The contention of this part of the chess world is that if a chess computer is good, a chess computer plus human player is even better. The computer can compute the board, the human can face off with the other player.

This isn’t a bad way of looking at how AI can be good for us; doing the bits of a task we’re not good at, and handing back control for the parts we are good at, like forming goals in a specific context. Context is still and will likely always be the realm of humans; the best chess computer there is still won’t know when it’s a good idea to just lose a game to your nephew at Christmas.

Faced with complex and even wicked problems, humans and machines working together closely have a chance to solve problems that are intractable now. We see this in the study and prediction of natural systems, like climate interacting with our human systems, creating Climate Change.

Working with big datasets lets us predict, and sometimes even ameliorate, the effects of climate on both human built systems and natural systems. That can be anything from predicting weather, to predicting effective locations to build artificial reefs where they are most likely to revitalize ocean life.

It’s worthwhile to note that few, or maybe even none, of the powerful goods that can come from AI are consumer facing. None of them are the LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators that we’ve come to know as AI. The benefits come from technical datasets paired with specialized AIs. Bespoke AIs can be good for a certain class of wicked problems- problems that are connected to large systems, where data is abundant and hard to understand, with dependancies that are even harder.

But Can Your God Count Fish All Day

Bespoke AIs are good for Gordian knots where the rope might as well be steel cord. In fact, undoing a complex knot is a lot like guessing how protein folding will work. Even if you enjoyed that kind of puzzle solving, you simply aren’t as good at it as an AI is. These are the good tasks for a golem, and it’s an exciting time to have these golems emerging, with the possibility of detecting faults in bridges, or factories, or any of our many bits of strong-then-suddenly-fragile infrastructure.

Students in Hawaii worked on AI projects during the pandemic, and all of them were pretty cool

Industrial and large data AI has the chance to change society for the better. They are systems that detect fish and let them swim upstream to spawn. They are NOAA storm predictions, and agricultural data that models a field of wheat down to the scale of centimeters. These are AI projects that could help us handle climate change, fresh water resources, farm to table logistics, or the chemical research we need to do to learn how get the poisons we already dumped into our environment back out.

AI, well used, could help us preserve and rehabilitate nature, improve medicine, and even make economies work better for people without wasting scarce resources. But those are all hard problems, harder  to build than just letting an LLM lose to train on Reddit. They are also not as legible for most funders, because the best uses of AI, the uses that will survive this most venal of ages, are infrastructural, technical, specialized, and boring.

The AIs we will build to help humanity won’t be fun or interesting to most people. They will be part of the under-appreciated work of infrastructure, not the flashy consumer facing chatbots most people think is all that AI is. Cleaning up waterways, predicting drug forms, and making factories more efficient is never going to get the trillion dollars of VC money AI chatbots are supposed to somehow 10x their investments on. And so, most people seeing mainly LLMs, we ask if AI is good or bad, without knowing to ask what kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about.

(Go to Part Two)

Amid all the warmongering last week, there was an interesting head fake in the Senate.

On Tuesday, JD Vance went to a Senate lunch (rather than the Situation Room meeting on Iran) at which he told them the deadline for passing was the August recess — starting August 4.

On Wednesday, Susie Wiles went for a very short visit to the Senate to order them to get the whole thing done by July 4.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is encouraging Congress to get the “big, beautiful bill” to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4.

Wiles told GOP senators at a closed-door lunch that the Independence Day deadline still holds as far as Trump is concerned, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

I started to write a long post (piggybacking on this one) about how the various timelines — the legal responses to Trump’s abuses and the economic impact of his disastrous policy choices — might make it harder to codify key parts of his abuses in law with the Big Ugly reconciliation bill. I was going to lay out how recent developments (this was so long ago I surmised that Trump’s Iran warmongering might cause him some political headaches and now … here we are, Trump talking regime change in the wake of an inconclusive illegal strike) might exacerbate the way his legislative agenda might be Overtaken By Events.

That post got Overtaken By Events.

The punch line of my original post was going to be an argument that Wiles was pushing the Senate to hurry up not because impending financial doom might make passing the Big Ugly harder, nor because the debt ceiling is approaching.

Rather, Kristi Noem is burning through cash.

President Trump’s immigration crackdown is burning through cash so quickly that the agency charged with arresting, detaining and removing unauthorized immigrants could run out of money next month.

Why it matters: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already $1 billionover budget by one estimate, with more than three months left in the fiscal year. That’s alarmed lawmakers in both parties — and raised the possibility of Trump clawing funds from agencies to feed ICE.

• Lawmakers say ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at risk of violating U.S. law if it continues to spend at its current pace.
• That’s added urgency to calls for Congress to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could direct an extra $75 billion or so to ICE over the next five years.
• It’s also led some lawmakers to accuse DHS and ICE of wasting money. “Trump’s DHS is spending like drunken sailors,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the DHS appropriations subcommittee.

Zoom in: ICE’s funding crisis is being fueled by Trump’s team demanding that agents arrest 3,000 immigrants a day — an unprecedented pace ICE is still trying to reach.

This creates the possibility for a slew of legal challenges to Stephen Miller’s dragnet, both from those targeted in it challenging the legality of spending money to target them in the first place, but also from opponents who can start suing Trump for breaking the law by spending money that was not appropriated.

The dragnet is at somewhat-imminent risk of becoming an illegal use of funds.

And that comes as a few Republicans — most loudly, Rand Paul, who was bypassed as Chair for the Senate language on homeland security funding — start raising questions about why we need to blow so much money if Miller has already shut down the border.

Sen. Rand Paul is a frequent thorn in GOP leadership’s side. But his recent break over border security funding in President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” has top Republicans pushing the bounds of institutional norms to rein him in.

Senior Republicans have sidelined the Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in their talks with the White House over policies under the panel’s purview.

Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told POLITICO he has taken over as the lead negotiator around how to shepherd through tens of billions of dollars for border wall construction and related infrastructure in the GOP megabill. Meanwhile, a Senate Republican aide said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) — who heads the relevant Homeland Security subcommittee — will be the point person for negotiating the bill’s government affairs provisions.

With every other committee chair helping manage negotiations for their panels’ portions of the massive tax and spending package, cutting Paul out is unprecedented. But Paul proposed funding border security at a fraction of what the administration requested and the House passed in its bill.

I’ve long been tracking conflict among Republicans over the financial parts of the Big Ugly. But even as Trump’s polling turns south on Miller’s gulag, the huge funding package for it is creating some headaches for the must-pass reconciliation bill.

In an op-ed in Fox News today (accompanied by live Fox News pressure), John Thune gives up the game.

He argues that Republicans have to get the bill done by July 4 — Susie Wiles’ deadline, not JD’s. And his argument focuses primarily on the immigration funding (but also Golden Dome, which Mark Kelly recently exposed as an impossible boondoggle).

In large part, this bill is the culmination of President Trump’s campaign promises and the promises that Republican senators have made to our voters. Chief among them is keeping the American people safe through strong border security and a military strong enough to deter threats and conflicts around the world before they begin.

President Trump has achieved remarkable success in ending the Biden border crisis and removing the criminal illegal aliens that President Biden let walk into our country – but it hasn’t been cheap, and the administration has told us that resources are running out. This bill will fully fund the border wall and President Trump’s successful policies for the entirety of his presidency, removing any possibility that Democrats will hold those resources hostage to try to increase other government spending.

This same principle also applies to defense funding. Recent conflicts around the world should make clear the need to have a modern and lethal fighting force that can keep the American people safe. This means smart, generational investments like President Trump’s Golden Dome for America to defend against advanced drones, missiles, and hypersonics, as well as prioritizing building new ships and unmanned vehicles.

A nation cannot prosper unless it is secure, and with our borders and defense capabilities bolstered, the next key pillar of this bill is creating prosperity in America.

[snip]

Senators have worked to develop this bill for well over a year now. Now it is time to act. Border resources are drying up. National security needs have never been more apparent. And with each passing day, we move closer to reaching both our nation’s debt limit and the largest-ever tax increase on the American people.

Senators return to Washington today and we will remain here until this bill is passed. We know that Democrats will fearmonger and misrepresent our efforts, and we expect them to drag this debate long into the night with unrelated issues. However, I am confident we will get this bill across the finish line. [my emphasis]

It may not be just the burn rate of Noem’s spending spree.

That is, Noem is blowing through cash and the result of it is horrible images of American citizens being assaulted by masked goons. Noem is blowing through cash and businessmen in all sorts of industries are discovering that their businesses will suffer. Noem is blowing through cash and everyone is talking about how terrible the consequences of Miller’s demand for 3,000 bodies a day is.

Noem is blowing through cash and the issue of immigration is becoming a liability, not Trump’s biggest advantage.

And so Thune will attempt to do Susie Wiles’ bidding to get the dragnet funded before it’s too late.

The magistrate judge who presided over a detention hearing for Kilmar Abrego Garcia (KAG) last week, Barbara Holmes, has ruled that the government is not entitled to further review of his detention, but even if they were, they would not meet the standard under the Bail Reform Act to keep him jailed pre-trial.

The takeaway of her ruling is that the government’s attempt to claim the alleged presence of minors in the van he drove made his alleged crime — transporting undocumented migrants — serious enough to merit detention failed. The evidence didn’t pass the sniff test.

But the ruling is important because it documents just how shitty the case against KAG is, which (as far as I saw), just Adam Klasfeld and Katelyn Polantz attempted to do before this.

The alleged kid in the van

There were two main problems with the evidence. First, the evidence that one of the guys in the van KAG was driving through Tennessee when he was stopped back in November 2022 was a minor is based on hearsay after hearsay.

The TN State Trooper who stopped KAG passed around a piece of paper and asked everyone in the van to write down their name and date of birth. The government introduced this part of the roster, claiming it showed that one guy was born in 2007, and so would have been 15 at the time. That was the primary basis of their claim that KAG’s alleged crime involved a minor.

But the direct witness to that would be the guy in question, and the government hasn’t tracked him down.

The next most direct witness would have been the Trooper, who (Holmes noted) could have described whether he thought that guy looked young. But for some unstated reason, the government didn’t call him as a witness. Instead, everything came in through the government’s sole witness, whom Holmes describes as ICE HSI Special Agent Peter Joseph.

Note, I’ve seen other people say Joseph is an FBI Agent; if he really is HSI, it would make another of these politicized cases that don’t involve the FBI. Thus far, the sole exception is the Hannah Dugan case.

The Trooper’s own body cam got purged; what was presented was his partner’s. And while that body cam footage corroborates the hearsay claim that the Trooper got the roster, it doesn’t capture the guys filling it out.

While the body camera footage – which is itself hearsay – includes the passing around of a piece of paper among the vehicle occupants at the direction of a THP trooper on the scene, the detail of the roster is visible only briefly in the body camera footage.

The Trooper claims that he photographed the passports and saw no entry stamps. But those photos can’t be found. And the body cam footage that exists doesn’t show him taking photos.

However, even though the photograph of the roster was produced, the photographs of the passports cannot be located, according to Special Agent Joseph’s testimony. 17

17 According to Special Agent Joseph, THP Trooper Foster also stated he is almost 100% certain that none of the vehicle occupants’ passports had stamps from port of entry. However, the body camera footage, which the Court fully reviewed, does not show THP Trooper Foster taking any passport photographs or even that he was provided with passports. The Court recognizes that the footage is not from THP Trooper Foster’s body camera. The footage does, however, appear to show THP Trooper Foster’s entire interaction with the vehicle occupants.

And all that’s before you look at the number, which (KAG’s lawyers pointed out in the hearing) looks like it could have been overwritten, and even if it weren’t, Holmes observes, 1s and 7s are numbers that can be confused.

So Holmes found that that allegation was not credible enough to win the government a further detention hearing.

The criminal aliens Pam Bondi wants to free

The other primary claims about KAG go through three familially-related cooperating witnesses. As I noted when I unpacked the indictment, this entire case rests on their credibility.

As Holmes described it, this was double (or triple) hearsay testimony of three witnesses all of whom hope to remain in the country, two of whom are felons the government will or already has freed. And the testimony of those guys as to whether KAG brought his special needs kids with him is not remotely credible just as a matter of logistics.

Special Agent Joseph testified that the first and second (male) cooperators testified or stated in interviews that Abrego typically took his children with him on trips during which he was allegedly smuggling undocumented people from one place to another. The first female cooperator testified to also having knowledge of this alleged conduct. Importantly, each cooperating witness upon whose statements the government’s argument for detention rests stands to gain something from their testimony in this case.

The first cooperator, who provided interview statements and grand jury testimony, has two prior felony convictions, has previously been deported five times, and was released early from a 30-month federal prison sentence for human smuggling as part of his cooperation in this case. He is the purported domestic leader of the human smuggling organization in which Abrego is accused of participating. He has been granted deferred action on deportation in exchange for his testimony. Special Agent Joseph acknowledged on cross-examination that the first cooperator will likely be granted work release as part of the conditions of the halfway house in which he currently resides following his early release from prison.

The second cooperator is also an avowed member of the human smuggling organization and is presently in custody charged with a federal crime for which he hopes to be released in exchange for his cooperating grand jury testimony. He has also been previously deported and has requested deferred action on deportation in exchange for his cooperation. The second cooperator is a closely related family member of the first cooperator.

The first female cooperator is also closely related to the first and second male cooperators. She testified before a federal grand jury in Texas about the investigation of Abrego and has requested deferred action on deportation in exchange for her cooperation. Special Agent Joseph did not personally interview this first female cooperator.

The Court gives little weight to this hearsay testimony – double hearsay through Special Agent Joseph’s testimony – of the first male cooperator, a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation, who has now obtained for himself an early release from federal prison and delay of a sixth deportation by providing information to the government. Nor do the hearsay statements of the second male cooperator on this issue fare any better, as his requested release from jail and delay of another deportation depends on providing information the government finds useful. Even without discounting the weight of the testimony of the first and second male cooperators for the multiple layers of hearsay, their testimony and statements defy common sense.

Both male cooperators stated that, other than three or four trips total without his children, Abrego typically took his children with him during the alleged smuggling trips from Maryland to Houston and back, some 2,900 miles round-trip, as often as three or four times per week. The sheer number of hours that would be required to maintain this schedule, which would consistently be more than 120 hours per week of driving time, approach physical impossibility. For that additional reason, the Court finds that the statements of the first and second male cooperators are not reliable to establish that this case “involves a minor victim.”

The problems with these guys’ testimony goes further still. The claims that KAG at one point transported guns goes through them — which raises the question why the repeat felon has never been charged for having them.

The first cooperator, the leader of the human smuggling operation, in a changed statement from his initial interview, stated that he was a collector and buyer and seller of guns, that he would regularly give guns to his drivers, and that he gave one or two to Abrego, who took them back to Maryland during transports.29 The second cooperator made similar statements about witnessing Abrego purchase and transport guns.

If truthful, these circumstances are concerning. However, the reliability of the evidence is questionable, which detracts from the weight it will be given. The first cooperator only provided this information in a second interview, described in Special Agent Joseph’s testimony as “different or evolved” from the first interview. Further, there is no other evidence of Abrego possessing firearms.

29 The first cooperator’s admitted prior criminal history at least suggests that he might be prohibited from possessing firearms. If so, it is unclear whether the first cooperator is receiving immunity from prosecution or some other concession for this information.

Worse still, the first guy — the repeat felon — debunked the second guy’s claim that KAG was an MS-13 member.

Contrary to the statements of the second cooperator and NV, the first male cooperator told Special Agent Joseph that, in ten years of acquaintance with Abrego, there were no signs or markings, including tattoos, indicating that Abrego is an MS-13 member. This statement specifically repudiates any outward indicia that Abrego belongs to MS-13, in stark contrast to the non-specific second cooperator’s and N.V.’s feelings that Abrego may belong to MS-13.

Your star witness, Attorney General Bondi, says the President is a liar.

In a footnote, Holmes basically says, “this is all you’ve got on this gang claim?”

25 Given the volume of resources committed to the government’s investigation of Abrego since April 2025, according to Special Agent Joseph, the Court supposes that if timely, more specific, concrete evidence exists of Abrego’s alleged MS-13 gang membership or a consistent pattern of intentional conduct designed to threaten or intimidate specific individuals, the government would have offered that evidence at the detention hearing.

Perhaps she also saw that ABC interview?

The one other witness (who has been paid for her cooperation in the past) implicating KAG with MS-13 membership, offered a vague, unsworn description from five years ago, when she was a teenager, and. her family has ties to 18 Barrio gang, the gang against which KAG was found to have credible fear of retaliation in his immigration proceedings.

Some of this evidence would get stronger at trial, where all these avowed human smugglers would have to testify under oath themselves.

But you still have the patently obvious case where Pam Bondi’s DOJ is larding on benefits for the kind of people that Stephen Miller likes to disappear to CECOT, and they’re doing so primarily so they can send KAG to CECOT instead of them.

Pam Bondi went on TV and talked about how dangerous all this is (accusing him of human trafficking, with which Hughes notes, he was not charged), implicating that KAG was grooming children but she was prosecuting and convicting them.

These facts demonstrate Abrego Garcia is a danger to our community.

[snip]

Co-conspirators allege that and we were clear to say that he is charged with, it’s not, only very serious charges of smuggling. And again, there were children involved in that. Human trafficking, not only in our country but in our world is very, very real. It’s very dangerous. And as you saw recently in Virginia, the arrest we made of the MS-13 member, unrelated to this, we learned at that press conference, that’s where they bring young children into our country and they start grooming them at middle school age to become MS-13, full-fledged members commit violent crimes throughout our country. It is highly organized, it is very dangerous, and they are living throughout our country. But no more because they are being arrested. They are being prosecuted and being convicted and deported when appropriate.

Except not her star witnesses, whose testimony conflicts, and who were the guys allegedly directing KAG to do what he did.

Pam Bondi is going to free those guys into the United States — maybe even let them stay.

Does Stephen Miller know about this? Because this is the kind of thing he accuses Democratic politicians of doing, threatening to arrest them for doing so.

The government has already appealed this decision, and everyone involved admits KAG may simply be snapped up in immigration detention if he is freed. But for now, a judge has debunked much of the inflated claims DOJ made.

Trump has been [cough] gunning for the US international order since long before he was inaugurated.

The reasons why are important. He has a zero sum game approach to everything, and so treats alliances and all soft power as rip-offs. That resentment, at the core of Trump’s personality, is one of many things Vladimir Putin exploited to make Trump hate his military alliances. And as the US legal system had the audacity to subject him to it, Trump developed a need to destroy rule of law. That he can restore his self-illusion of business prowess by extorting bribes on an industrial scale is just gravy.

And so he came into power with the intent of destroying several — but not all — prongs to US hegemony, the prongs that lowered the cost of sustaining America’s dominant role in the world even as China threatens it: US alliances, US soft power, and a claim to US exceptionalism.

He’s still got the unsurpassed military. America’s tech platforms remain the dominant communications network of the world and, with that, its attendant ease of spying. For the moment — but possibly only for the moment — the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, which permits the US to fund everything else and coerce compliance in more subtle ways.

But, partly out of psychological fragility, Trump has chosen to destroy several key tools that made exercising US power easier and cheaper. He has forgone hegemony in the search of dominance. Trump’s military parade failed to give him the psychological fulfillment he sought, and so Bibi Netanyahu was able to sell him on an illegal invasion of Iran that would fill that need.

Yesterday’s strike on Iran dealt at least the symbolic death blow to the Western world order put into place after World War II to prevent follow-on catastrophes. Trump already launched a structural attack on the institution that would hold him accountable alongside Putin and Bibi Netanyahu for war crimes; the NYT finally matched Quinn’s post on the attack on the ICC yesterday (using both the digital hegemony the US still maintains but also the financial hegemony is may piss away). Trump intends to do the same to much of the UN as well.

By refusing to alert Democratic lawmakers of the attack — by violating not just the War Powers Act (which has become a three decade habit) but also the National Security Act — Trump launched this war as an attack on democracy, both on the Democratic Party as the legitimate opposition but also on Congress as a coequal brach of power, as much as on Iran.

While I haven’t read it all, what I have read makes me think the academic and popular literature on democratic backsliding never considers for what happens when a significant power, much less a hegemon, backslides. Two models we’ve adopted to measure Trump’s rush to eliminate American democracy — Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia — both bear important lessons (not least because Orbán and Putin have both facilitated Trump’s return and instructed his policy approach). But both men exploited a moment of weakness in their country, whereas Trump is in the process of deliberately pissing away much of America’s strength to carry out his goals, many of which are personal glorification as much as successful authoritarianism.

Trump cares more about the feeling of domination than he does about success for anyone but himself and loyal allies, much less than the country as a whole. And that psychological craving for the feeling of domination is what Bibi played to — in the wake of Trump’s flaccid military parade and the contrasting joy of the No Kings protests — to get him to join a war of choice against Iran. Trump was manipulated to use dominance rather than hegemony against Iran in part because his other efforts to obtain full capitulation — from law firms, from Harvard, from California, from China — have failed.

Stephen Miller, too, seems to know how to trigger Trump’s psychological need for domination, even while Miller’s administrative ineptitude creates surface area for attack in the larger effort to pursue authoritarianism.

Partly as a result, that craving for domination has led Trump to fuck the US economy: with Miller’s gulag, with his own trade war, with his attacks on US scientific and medical dominance. And this is where the backsliding analysis misses, in my opinion.

We have no idea what will come from Trump’s stupid and illegal decision to join Bibi’s attack on Iran. This is not Iraq 2.0 for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush and Cheney attempted to limit civilian casualties whereas Bibi, with Trump’s blessing, is already pursuing the annihilation of Palestinians, and so we must consider whether similar annihilation is in the works in Iran.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because, even though Bush 2 was unable to match the diplomatic commitment to an Iraq War that Bush 1 achieved, W was still able to persuade allies to join the effort. While it seems exceedingly likely that some European allies will join or at least tacitly sanction this invasion, they’ll do so knowing their relationship has become one of coercion. They’ll know that Trump will sell out any contribution like he and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth love to attack the Danes for their sacrifices in the Afghan war.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because, whereas Cheney used that war to expand and perfect US surveillance, Trump is largely ignoring external surveillance, relying instead on lies from Bibi, preparing instead to vastly expand its focus internally.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because during Iraq 1.0 the US was a largely uncontested hegemon, whereas Trump has not only destroyed the tools by which the US persuades rather than coerces cooperation, he has a psychological need to seek only coerced capitulation. Absent that — in the face of pushback on Ukraine, on his trade war, and on democracy itself — he became and becomes vulnerable to cooptation by people like Bibi. Trump left a G-7 that refused to capitulate to him and sprinted headlong into Bibi’s warm embrace.

We don’t know how Trump’s attack on Iran will affect efforts to combat his authoritarianism internally. He will definitely use it as a justification to increase crackdowns on dissent, but he’s already deploying emergencies to do that, and given the many ways Trump violated the law to launch this attack, it’s unclear how much more amenable courts will be to treat this one as real. Before the attack, key factions of his base — including true opponents of war, Russian useful idiots, unconstrained antisemites, and what few real libertarians are left in the US — spoke out against the operation. Many are already falling into line, but it’s unclear whether that will last if things go badly from here. And those outside Trump’s base and outside the Fox News bubble at least thus far oppose this intervention. Trump will be attempting to sell this war without laying any groundwork for it, even as the things that were making him increasingly unpopular — the ICE raids — will not go away or grow less visible.

But what we do know is the international order has just been dismantled and whatever advantages the US military and dragnet give it, Trump is limiting the value of those advantages by weakening the US economy and possibly US financial hegemony even as China will want to respond to this attack.

Attacking Iran will exacerbate the effect of Trump’s attacks on the US economy, domestically. And it will therefore increase China’s leverage over us — and increase the import of the leverage over rare metals in this confrontation. And that’s before China uses this opportunity to extend its own hegemony, which it was already doing.

At every stage, Trump and Miller have pursued things that an aspiring dictator in a declining state might do to stave off further decline. But those very same acts from a country with what had been the best economy in the world, currency hegemony, and unsurpassed scientific know-how have the opposite effect. They make the aspiring dictator weaker, first externally and then, as a result, internally.

Which is to say that Trump’s choice to swap global hegemony for attempted dominance may undermine his pursuit of dominance both at home and abroad.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

On March 18, 1969, the U.S. military launched a secret program authorized by then-president Richard Nixon. Code named Operation Menu, the U.S. bombed targets in Cambodia until May 26, 1970.

The program was never authorized by Congress; information about the bombings were withheld from both Congress and the American public.

It was a gross abuse of executive power and the basis for drafting an Article of Impeachment against Nixon. The article did not receive adequate support in Congress because a number of members of Congress felt they had not done enough to restrain Nixon with regard to the Vietnam War, and public opinion had not yet shifted firmly against Nixon because of the Watergate scandal.

Three of six Articles of Impeachment did receive approval, however; the unauthorized bombing of Cambodia emphasized the abuses of power delineated in the approved articles.

Fortunately for Nixon, Republican members of Congress took him aside and told him they had the votes to impeach and remove him if he didn’t resign. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, avoiding hearings and heightened scrutiny of his abuses of his office.

Donald Trump authorized the bombing of Iran. His secretary of defense did not restrain him by requiring an Authorization for Use of Military Force. Neither of them made much effort to keep the mission secret as it launched Saturday as Trump posted about it to his personal Truth Social account.

Congress was not informed of the operation in order to debate an AUMF. Congress received testimony from Trump’s director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on March 25 in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which she said,

… The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.

In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons. …

There were exchanges with the media and public between the administration about Gabbard’s statement regarding the enriched uranium stockpile. If the status of that stockpile had changed with a firm move toward arming a weapon occurred, there has been no effort to communicate that with the Senate Intelligence or Armed Services Committees.

The American public was lied to by Trump who announced this past Thursday, “Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”

Trump waffled publicly about U.S. military action against Iran, saying, ““You don’t know that I’m going to even do it,” Trump told one reporter. “I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do. … “ I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final [call] … I like to make a final decision one second before it’s due, you know?”

Trump failed to request approval from Congress before making that final call some time between Thursday and Saturday.

It’s possible the call had already been made and Trump’s apparent indecision was a head fake. An analyst with Haaretz seemed to think this was a possible strategy. EDIT: The Atlantic published an article at 12:29 a.m. ET Sunday in which they reported Trump had already decided to bomb Iran on Wednesday, before his public statement about a two-week window of decision.

Head fake or no, Trump violated the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 which grants Congress the power to declare war. It is not a power granted to the executive who “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” under Article II, Section 3.

Trump has already repeatedly failed under the Take Care clause. This first strike against Iran conducted without Congressional approval should be a road too far.

The blowback from this may be enormous, beginning with global economic effects due to instability in the fossil fuels market and may include terrorist or overt military strikes against U.S. targets, perhaps by way of surrogate networks Gabbard also testified about on March 25.

Trump is without a doubt worse than Nixon. He should be impeached — again, yes — and this time removed from office.

WSJ published a curious profile of Stephen Miller at 9PM on Friday night.

Bylined by accomplished Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey, first, and accomplished journalist Rebecca Balhaus, second, it runs over 1800-words — a considerable journalistic investment.

It tells us a number of things we already know. “Stephen Miller wanted to keep the planes in the air—and that is where they stayed,” the lede implies, but does not confirm, that Miller was the one who ordered DHS to defy Judge Boasberg’s order not to deport migrants to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act, a topic currently being contested in discovery in that lawsuit.

“He has written or edited every executive order that Trump has signed,” it notes, without commenting on the typos and fabrications that permeate the orders. He’s the guy — again, we already knew this — who launched jihads against institutions that an extremist like him would view as liberal. “He has been responsible for the administration’s broadsides against universities, law firms and even museums.”

The article doesn’t include Miller’s native California in that particular sentence, though over 30 paragraphs later, it describes him claiming to know what is good for — what WSJ seemingly paraphrases as — California’s own “citizens,” always a loaded word when you’re discussing Stephen Miller.

Miller, who grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., said large swaths of Los Angeles were engaged in a “rebellion,” according to people present.

Los Angeles had become like Cancún, he said—it was fine to visit, but not good for its own citizens. To conclude the event, Leavitt told the crowd that Miller needed to return to his work of deportations.

WSJ’s description of his possibly unlawful role in invading his home state appears just five paragraphs after confirming he was the guy who targeted universities and law firms, linking to the WSJ story that remains the best report on Miller’s demands for more bodies, though neither of the journalists bylined on this story had a byline on the other one.

His orders to increase arrests regardless of migrants’ criminal histories set off days of protests in Los Angeles. Miller coordinated the federal government’s response, giving orders to agencies including the Pentagon, when Trump sent in the Marines and the National Guard, according to officials familiar with the matter.

And that paragraph fingering Miller for the invasion of California immediately follows a paragraph that describes that he “suggested” using the Alien Enemies Act but stops short of confirming that he’s the guy who made the declaration, even though Trump himself disclaimed doing so.

Miller, who isn’t a lawyer, is the official who first suggested using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, which the Justice Department pursued. He also privately, then publicly, floated suspending habeas corpus, or the right for prisoners to challenge their detention in court, which the administration hasn’t tried. That prompted pushback from other senior White House and Justice Department officials.

WSJ includes the observation that Miller’s call to suspend habeas corpus “prompted pushback from other senior White House and Justice Department officials” and that “the administration hasn’t tried” that legal move in a different paragraph than one that claims, “There are some limits to his influence.” The paragraph that purports to describe the limits to his influence includes just one thing he didn’t get (an effort to kill the Meta antitrust case) but also includes one thing he did, at least so far (a reversal of the decision to limit deportations).

There are some limits to his influence. He was supportive of Meta’s push to settle its antitrust case, which fell flat. Trump last week signaled concerns that the administration’s deportation policies were too aggressive, calling for a pause in some deportations that he has since rolled back. Trump, asked how Miller’s directives on deportations squared with his own, declined to put distance between the two of them. “We have a great understanding,” Trump said.

There are few hints as to how Miller wields power. His office is steps from the Oval Office — again, we knew that — and “some posts at cabinet agencies have been described by administration officials as reporting directly to Miller, effectively bypassing cabinet secretaries,” that must include Homeland Security, which would be pertinent to mention given that one of the dishiest tidbits in the whole article is that in Trump’s first term, Trump refused to give Miller a leadership role at Homeland Security. “Trump declined, according to a former administration official, telling aides he thought Miller wasn’t leader material.”

The article describes Miller’s success pushing for a travel ban in the first Administration and notes he expanded the list to twelve this time around. But it doesn’t mention that a leaked cable disclosing that Trump is considering expanding that list to 36 countries, including most of Africa, a leak that has been broadly replicated in a way that indicates real pushback.

The article alludes to “Several White House staffers” who observe that Miller always adopts the most extreme legal posture and, in the same sentence, describes that that extreme posture has led even SCOTUS to rebuke the Administration. But the only person described — quoted even! — as drawing the obvious conclusion, that Miller fucked up, is a Trump opponent. “‘I think the administration has miscalculated and overstepped,’ said Skye Perryman, who leads Democracy Forward, an organization that has repeatedly sued Trump.”

That’s one of just a few direct quotes in the 1800-word piece (the others are from Trump, from Karoline Leavitt, and from Miller himself). Indeed, everything about this article couches where it comes from. It chooses not to list how many Republicans contributed to the story. In some cases, passive constructions like, “have been described by administration officials,” obscures whether WSJ learned what it reports directly from those administration officials, or heard them second-hand.

A different article might have noted that if Miller really is issuing some of these orders, such as to deploy Marines to invade Los Angeles, it means entire operations are wildly unconstitutional. He’s not the President. Only the President can invoke the Alien Enemies Act or usurp California’s National Guard, even if Miller typed up the error-riddled Executive Orders that effected the commands. Amid Trump’s squawks about a Joe Biden autopen scandal, even Trump has confessed he doesn’t understand what he has signed.

A different article might have described how Miller used Trump’s vulnerability in the wake of being shot at to make racism the central plank of the campaign and now the Administration (though it does describe how Miller overrode Tony Fabrizio’s advice to do so).

A different article might have called Miller something besides an “immigration hawk.”

This is not that article, however.

This is an article published by a Murdoch rag at 9PM on a Friday night — the sweet spot where you publish news someone wants to bury — recording some uncertain number of Republicans who, in the face of declining poll numbers on immigration (but even in an article that described “concerns that the administration’s deportation policies were too aggressive,” saying nothing about the damage Miller’s jihad is doing to the economy, much less that entire states are on the verge of losing their harvests) have ever so delicately started to blame Miller: for the court losses, for the backlash, for the unsolicited calls likened to, “a grandmother who wouldn’t stop talking and said his calls were akin to listening to a podcast.”

The first real break in the cowered omertà about Stephen Miller’s role and plans was that Washington Examiner piece fleshing out Axios’ scoop about Miller’s demands for 3,000 bodies a day, which was followed by NBC, then the aforementioned superb WSJ story. Right wingers want to talk about Stephen Miller’s responsibility for the chaos (and economic destruction) in California and elsewhere. And while there have been far more useful profiles explaining how he accrued power and where his pathologies come from, this profile of hushed complaints seems like something else. A test to see whether opposition to Miller can succeed.

It may even be something more. NYT reports that, even as it scored several court victories, Harvard sought a meeting to negotiate detente with the Trump White House, one about which both Linda McMahon and Trump have been more optimistic than Harvard. NYT doesn’t mention that Trump needs a deal with higher ed, in part, because Trump needs a deal with China, and protection for Chinese students would be part of any deal.

Meanwhile, we’re 11 days short of DOJ’s deadline to appeal the first order reversing Miller’s attack on law firms, and there’s no sign yet they will appeal. That effort only succeeded in driving key lawyers away from firms that buckled to Trump.

And yesterday, again, Trump hinted that he’s struggling to find some way out of the damage Miller’s immigration jihad has done.

Miller’s jihads have, increasingly, created problems to solve. Which may explain why wary sources are happy to unpack old stories about how Trump once recognized Miller is not leader material.

I’m not complaining that WSJ dedicated 1800-words to describing the centrality of Stephen Miller to the biggest abuses of the Trump second term (and many of the first). It is of acute import to understand how the man’s pathologies endanger the country and the world.

I’m simply observing that this profile, published at 9PM on a Friday night, says as much in how it is told as in anything that it tells.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

We’re still in the end-of-term desk clearing zone at the Supreme Court. SCOTUS released a whopping six decisions today.

Decisions released:

FDA v. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.
Justice Barrett lead the 7-2 decision.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1187_olp1.pdf

Esteras v. United States
Justice Barrett also lead this 7-2 decision with Justice Alito and Gorsuch dissenting.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-7483_6k4c.pdf

McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corporation
Justice Kavanaugh wrote the 6-3 decision.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1226_1a72.pdf

Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. Environmental Protection Agency
Surprisingly, Justice Kavanaugh wrote this 7-2 decision and not Thomas who wrote Wednesday’s two decisions related to the EPA.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-7_8m58.pdf

Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida
Justice Gorsuch lead this 7-2 decision, although concurrence and dissent are a bit of a mish-mash:

GORSUCH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I and II, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, ALITO, KAGAN, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined, and an opinion with respect to Part III, in which ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which BARRETT, J., joined. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. JACKSON, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to Parts III and IV, except for n. 12.

See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-997_6579.pdf — you might want to read this one closely as it pertains to disability rights and nearly all of us at some point in our lives has been employed and been/will be disabled.

Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion.
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-20_f2bh.pdf

Of these six decisions I note that Justice Kagan wrote one dissent joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson in the matter of McLaughlin Chiropractic. She’s otherwise joined the conservatives. Hmm.

In my opinion, the big decision we are waiting for with the end of the term is Trump v. CASA Inc. regarding nationwide injunctions blocking executive orders, in this particular case related to birthright citizenship.

That this decision has not already been released disturbs me; it feels like Roberts is holding it off until SCOTUS can make a clean getaway at the very end of the term next week. But is Roberts preparing to flee the wrath of Trump and his Wormtongue Miller, or the wrath of the people?

“Honest History Matters!” Protesters lining up

Donald Trump’s EO entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” was issued on March 27th, taking aim at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service for daring to try to tell the whole story of American History, and not just the parts that validate the White America version that Trump believes.

Section 1.  Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.

Kind of hard to read those words the day after the Juneteenth holiday, in the midst of Pride month, and after Trump’s budget slashing the funding of tribal colleges and universities by 90% went up to Congress, but I guess Trump’s gotta Trump.

Fast forward a couple of months, and we can see how the Department of the Interior is looking to implement Trump’s EO. From NPR, June 9, 2025:

The Department of the Interior is requiring the National Park Service (NPS) to post signage at all sites across the country by June 13, asking visitors to offer feedback on any information that they feel portrays American history and landscapes in a negative light.

The June 9 memo sent to regional directors by National Park Service comptroller Jessica Bowron and leaked to NPR states the instructions come in response to President Trump’s March “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s follow-up order last month requesting its implementation. Trump’s original order included a clause ordering Burgum to remove content from sites that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living and instead focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

I can just see Burgum rubbing his hands together with glee. “MAGA’s gonna love this. It’s DIY DOGE-ing the liberals while they visit the parks!” Similarly, I can hear Stephen Miller’s reply of “Excellent” in his best Mr. Burns voice.

Well fellas, you asked, and National Park visitors answered. Spoiler alert: Burgum and Miller will not be happy. From Government Executive yesterday:

In the responses submitted by visitors to National Park Service sites, however, which were obtained by Government Executive, no single submission pointed to any such examples [of inappropriate signage and language]. Instead, in the nearly 200 submissions NPS received in the first days since the solicitations were posted, visitors implored the administration not to erase U.S. history and praised agency staff for improving their experiences.

[snip]

So far, NPS is not getting the help it was hoping for from those scanning the QR codes now posted around park sites soliciting assistance in identifying language in violation of Trump and Burgum’s orders. Instead, visitors accused the Trump administration of seeking to erase the nation’s history.

What? Unpossible! What did those pesky park visitors say? GovExec goes on:

“There shouldn’t be signs about history that whitewash and erase the centuries of discrimination against the people who have cared for this land for generations,” a visitor to Indian Dunes National Park said.

A visitor to Independence Hall in Philadelphia called the new signs “censorship dressed up as customer service.”

“What upset me the most about the museum—more than anything in the actual exhibits—were the signs telling people to report anything they thought was negative about Americans,” the visitor said. “That isn’t just frustrating, it’s outrageous. It felt like an open invitation to police and attack historians for simply doing their jobs: telling the truth.”

Several visitors to the Stonewall National Monument in New York lamented changes there the park’s website that removed mention of transgender individuals in the Stonewall Uprising.

“Put them back,” the visitor said. “Honor them. There would be no Stonewall without trans people.”

More truth-telling at the link.

Some protesters wave signs as they march in the streets. Others scan QR codes and write comments.

These aren’t comments on lefty websites. These are official public comments to government requests for input from the public – input some poor soul has to read and summarize for Burgum and Miller. Can you picture the cold sweat breaking out on that civil servant’s brow, realizing he or she might be facing their own firing as the bearer of bad news? Sure you can.

Meanwhile, lots of folks are planning their next visit to a national park. By all means, go check them out, and don’t forget to click that QR code. Especially if you visit the Stonewall National Monument.

Last weekend, it was millions of loud voices shouting “No Kings!” This weekend, let it be millions of quiet thumbs and fingers tapping their phones.

Let the Good Trouble Making go on!

The Ninth Circuit — a panel of two Trump judges, Mark Bennett and Eric Miller, and one Biden one, Jennifer Sung — has unanimously overturned Judge Charles Breyer’s order enjoining Trump from using the National Guard to protect Federal personnel and property from anti-ICE protests. The decision affirms the court’s jurisdiction to review Trump’s decision (and holds out the possibility that things may change — for example, in how Trump is using the military or the urgency with which California needs its firefighting Guardsmen — that could change the outcome). But for now, Trump continues his invasion of California with the blessing of the Circuit Court.

The judges had all, including Sung, telegraphed at the hearing earlier this week that they would do so . Moreover, the decision itself is unsurprising; a number of legal commentators warned that Governor Newsom was likely to lose this case.

That’s partly because of an 1827 case, Martin v. Mott, that said even if the President abused such decision, the remedy was political. Here’s how the Ninth invoked it for to hold that it must give Trump deference on this decision.

[W]e are not writing on a blank slate. The history of Congress’s statutory delegations of its calling forth power, and a line of cases beginning with Martin v. Mott, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat.) 19 (1827), interpreting those delegations,strongly suggest that our review of the President’s determinations in this context is especially deferential.

[snip]

The Court further explained that although the power delegated to the President under the Milita Act is “susceptible of abuse,” the “remedy for this” is political: “in addition to the high qualities which the Executive must be presumed to possess, of public virtue, and honest devotion to the public interests,” it is “the frequency of elections, and the watchfulness of the representatives of the nation” that “carry with them all the checks which can be useful to guard against usurpation or wanton tyranny.”

Jack Goldsmith has been pointing to the import of that passage all week.

This won’t be the end of things. In its assessment of the harm, the court noted that violations of the Posse Comitatus Act were not before it (the state is now arguing it in their motion for a preliminary injunction), nor was an emergency (like a wildfire) for which California could claim it had immediate need of the Guardsmen. Having affirmed its authority to rule, Newsom might fare better at such a time. And in any case the state has added a slew of new facts below in its motion for a preliminary injunction.

But in the meantime, we would do well to take that lesson from Martin to heart: Politics remains a remedy. Not just a remedy, a necessary part of winning on this issue and on defeating fascism more generally.

And, increasingly, it’s a winning issue. Polls show — even a Fox News poll that has Trump screaming — that Trump is losing the battle to make this dragnet popular.

Certainly Newsom has been focused on that.

There’s been so much else going on, I’ve seen no focused commentary on the media campaign Newsom has been pursuing, even as he attempted to block the invasion in courts. Newsom has been conducting the kind of media campaign that the most realistic assessments of last year’s election loss say Democrats need to learn to do (admittedly, Newsom already took steps in this direction when he started a podcast).

Newsom’s prime time speech last week — widely applauded by those whining about so much else — has drawn a lot of attention.

Newsom repeated much of that same content in a column published at Fox, taking his argument to Trump’s base.

Over the past two weeks, federal agents conducted large-scale workplace raids around Southern California. They jumped out of unmarked vans, indiscriminately grabbing people off the street, chasing people in agricultural fields. A woman, 9 months pregnant, was arrested in LA; she had to be hospitalized after being released. A family with three children, including a three-year-old, was held for two days in an office basement without sufficient food or water.

Several people taken in the raids were deported the same day they were arrested, raising serious due process concerns. U.S. citizens have been harassed and detained. And we know that ICE is increasingly detaining thousands of people with no other criminal charges or convictions: Those arrested with no other criminal charges or convictions rose from about 860 in January to 7,800 this month – a more than 800% increase. Meanwhile, those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions rose at the much lower rate of 91%. Trump is lying about focusing on “the worst of the worst.”

While California is no stranger to immigration enforcement, what we’re seeing is a dangerous ploy for headlines by an administration that believes in cruelty and intimidation. Instead of focusing on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records and border security – a strategy both parties have long supported – the Trump administration is pushing mass deportations, targeting hardworking immigrant families, regardless of their roots or risk, in order to meet quotas.

He started a Substack the other day, describing it as an effort to “flood the zone and continue to cut through the right wing disinformation machine.”

He has done interviews with (best as I can tall, all male) influencers in his emergency response room over and over.

But the response by which I’ve been most fascinated is his trolling on Xitter — the import of which I discussed with LOLGOP earlier this week.

Between his personal account and a press account, Newsom has been supplementing more serious messaging with both  important political points and trolling.

The former focuses on the stature of California’s economy, the role migrants play in it, and the likely risk of Trump stealing California’s full-time Guard firefighters. In the likely event something will go catastrophically wrong — whether via economic collapse or natural disaster — thanks to Trump’s jihad against migrants, Newsom has made the case that Trump is responsible, in advance.

Some of that includes building pressure against Republicans applauding Trump’s invasion.

Newsom has long called out the higher crime rates under right wingers. He has called out Mike Johnson, Jason Smith, Tommy Tuberville, Markwayne Mullin, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders for their states’ higher murder rate than California.

The trolling mocks Trump’s aides, including Kristi Noem, Pete Hegeseth, Steven Cheung, and Karoline Leavitt, as when he contrasted how the Guard were left without a place to stay when while Whiskey Pete boasted about going to a ballgame.

But Newsom has focused his closest attention Stephen Miller.

Newsom has been mocking Stephen Miller’s total control over the Administration.

Relentlessly.

That builds on a number of personal spats with Miller directly, as when Newsom raised Trump’s pardon of Jan6ers to debunk claims anyone but him supports insurrectionists.

And when he called out how Miller is undermining efforts to disrupt fentanyl trafficking.

The personal focus on Miller extends to Newsom’s Press Office account, which has been calling out Miller’s bullshit.

Correcting Miller on the legal posture of sanctuary cities.

Pushing back on Miller’s complaints about Sanctuary cities.

Newsom’s Press Office has pushed other peoples’ memes.

And pushing a TikTok video of Miller’s early racism.

But the trolling from the Press Office itself gets more creative. I’ve already mentioned the sustained play on Star Wars.

And pop culture references, like Lord of the Rings.

The Press Office has found many ways to call Miller Voldemort.

Amid Trump’s flip flops on whether to exclude farmworkers from the raids, the Press Office account has adopted right wing styled memes.

And as Newsom also is, the Press Office account is mocking Trump’s capitulation to Miller on targeting farmworkers.

Also tracking Miller’s ability to override Donny.

As I discussed with LOLGOP, this trolling is structured in a productive way. Not only does it play on Trump’s own weakness (in recent days, rebranding Trump’s MAGA with that weakness), but it sets Miller up as the easy fall guy when shit starts hitting the fan. It does a lot of fact-checking, but frames this battle as much about ego and dick-wagging — the currency of the far right — as rational persuasion.

Stephen Miller’s gulag is not even backed by everyone in the Trump Administration. And that’s before the full effects of it — in higher housing costs, empty produce sections, and restaurant closures — are being felt. And Newsom has been making this about him, an easy target in the same way Musk is.

There are two ways to get the Guard restored to California: A legal win. Or making it a big enough political liability that Trump relents. Newsom is actually pursuing both.

There are problems with Newsom’s efforts. As mentioned, his outreach has been a veritable sausage fest, with a focus almost exclusively on outreach to male influencers. Sure. Trump won with the young male vote and young men are the ones pushing the disinformation. But there has to be a role for outreach to women.

I really wish Newsom had picked some other platform than Substack, which platforms Nazis.

And obviously, Newsom needs to replicate some of this on Bluesky, which Newsom has ignored since he got a personal account; his official account is staid. Newsom just got a Bluesky Press account, which replicates some of the trolling from Xitter, but thus far the trolling of Miller — which would be most important to go viral — has not shown up there.

But everyone needs to approach these battles using all three tools we have: legal, legislative, and political.

You don’t have to like Newsom to recognize that this trolling attempts the kind of messaging Democrats need to do more of. Indeed, his dickish personality and the long-standing bad blood with Trump may make this more effective.