The Great Realignment

Vladimir Putin gloats over the most successful intelligence operation in history.

I haven’t produced a Chaos Report in a while, and it’s not so much because the chaos has slowed down but because I’ve found something new to do about it.

I recently launched, as a project for The UnPopulist, an Executive Watch where I’m chronicling abuses of executive power under the Trump administration. As you can imagine, I have been very, very busy, and I’m going to continue to be very busy for a while, just trying to catch up to where we are now.

A reader asked me, in a somewhat passive-aggressive way: Where was this during previous administrations? But look, I’ve gone hammer and tongs on previous presidents about overstepping executive authority. I once wrote an article comparing President Obama to Emperor Palpatine, for crying out loud. I compared Kamala Harris to a fascist—this was back when she was trying to run to Biden’s left in 2020 by promising to do a bunch of things through executive orders that a president just can’t do through executive orders.

Actually, that Harris piece reminds me that I quoted Ayn Rand’s old prediction that eventually we were going to get fascism with communist slogans. It was a long time ago that she said that, and it strikes me that we all really under-estimated the possibility that we would get fascism with plain old fascist slogans.

The point is that it’s not like I’ve been soft on this issue. There’s a point in every presidency where the president’s legislative agenda runs out of steam. He’s facing opposition in Congress and can’t get anything passed, but there’s still pressure on him from the activists to do something. So he says, like Obama did, “I’ve got a pen and a phone,” and he starts trying to do things unilaterally through executive orders. But it’s usually pretty small, because there’s not much he actually can do legitimately by executive order, and a bunch of it gets tossed out by the courts. That’s what happened with Biden’s big push to use executive power to forgive student loans.

But to answer that reader’s question, an executive watch for previous presidents would have had a good solid entry maybe once a month. I probably could have found more if I looked hard for it. But under this president, it’s a flood, it’s daily, it’s several times a day. I’m not doing this full time, but I could be doing it full time and still struggle to keep up. So it’s such a quantitative difference that it become a qualitative difference. It’s just not the same thing.

At any rate, you should go check it out.

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The Great Realignment

I had originally intended to catch up on events with another Chaos Report, but by the time I completed my notes, they were so close to an article that I decided just to turn them into one. The written word is my preferred medium, anyway.

To get really caught up on events, there are three things I need to talk about, and I’ll be doing each in a separate post. I have to talk about what all of this assertion of executive power by Trump and by Elon Musk is adding up to, and I’ll be doing that soon. There’s something about what has happened to the American system that I want to nail down very precisely.

I also have to talk about what we can do and how we can resist this, which I’ll get to after that. I am afraid that I keep leaving my readers in a state of despair, and the fact is that we are not helpless.

But first I want to catch up on the Trump-Zelensky meeting from late last week and its aftermath. The big story here is an overall geopolitical realignment in which the US is allied with—well, we’re allied with the bad guys now.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here is Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

Trump’s vision aligns with the Russian vision, with Vladimir Putin’s vision. And this is not bluster. This is the cold, hard reality.