Trump Is Incapable of Being an Effective Wartime President

“I noted over the weekend several reasons why Donald Trump himself, his presidency, and his administration overall are nowhere near prepared for the Iran/Israel situation. … But the more that it becomes an Iran/US situation, the more it’s important to add one more important point: Trump is absolutely, utterly unprepared to rally the nation around a war effort. And nothing we’ve seen in the last ten years even hints that he’s capable of it.”

Jonathan Bernstein

A Decade of Trumpism

“Conventional political analyses do not come close to describing the way our world has been turned on its head. Yes, the GOP lost its spine and its balls; Democrats flailed; the electorate realigned. The enter>tainment wing of the GOP routed the establishment. Much of the rest of the media has been enshittified. … But that really doesn’t capture the velocity or the scope of the transformation. It’s not just our politics. America has become dumber, crueler, crazier, and more violent. To much of the rest of the world, we have become unrecognizable.”

Charlie Sykes

Welcome to the ‘Authoritarian Madness’

“Don’t kid yourself they know they are absolutely getting cooked politically with their terrible bill and rising prices, and they want to create a violent spectacle to feed their content machine. It’s time for the mainstream media to describe this authoritarian madness accurately.”

— Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), reacting on X to President Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles.

Stephen Miller’s Love of Hyperbole on Display

“The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States. For that reason alone, it’s the most essential piece of legislation currently under consideration in the entire Western World, in generations.”

— Trump aide Stephen Miller, on X, defending the Republican budget bill after Elon Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.”

Welcome to the Next Dark Ages

“The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. … The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.”

Adam Serwer