Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz is greater now than it was before Trump started his failed war in late February.

Now, the Islamic republic is formalizing its dominance over the strategic chokepoint by imposing a new transit regime. That is despite repeated warnings from the United States, which has imposed its own blockade on the strait. Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) -- a new body tasked with vetting and tolling vessels -- went operationally live on May 18. In a post on X on May 20 accompanied by a map, the PGSA outlined Iran’s zone of maritime control in the Strait of Hormuz. It said this covered the area between the line extending from "Kuh-e Mubarak in Iran to the south of Fujairah in the UAE... to the line connecting the tip of Qeshm island in Iran to Umm Al-Quwain in the UAE." It added that "transit through this area for the purpose of passing through the Strait of Hormuz requires coordination with, and authorization from, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority."

It's a revenue producer for the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s toll system could generate up to $3 billion per year at current levels, experts said. That figure could rise to around $8 billion annually if maritime traffic goes back to pre-war levels, when up to 140 vessels transited the strait every day. “The operators paying PGSA tolls are predominantly Chinese-linked and UAE-managed gray and shadow fleet actors that cannot secure state-level cover. No Western-flagged operator has publicly acknowledged payment,” Windward said in its May 20 report. Paying the fee could make shipping companies liable to US sanctions, experts said. Despite the risks, operators may be willing to do business with Iran.

So when having to choose between Trump and the Supreme Leader of Iran, oil tankers choose the latter.

Need more proof that Trump is a loser? Iran is rebuilding its military industrial capacity at a steady pace.

Iran rebuilding military industrial base faster than expected, already producing drones, according to US intel

Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated. The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term. While the time to restart production of different weapons components varies, some US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months, one of the sources, a US official, told CNN. “The Iranians have exceeded all timelines the IC had for reconstitution,” the US official said.

So Iran is quickly rebuilding its military and is getting oil importers to help pay for it with Strait of Hormuz tolls. SAD!

There's every indication that Trump ends up looking like a BIG FAT LOSER as a result of the Iran fiasco. Robert Kagan writes in The Atlantic...

On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy.

The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat).

A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself.

The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior US official.

The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge.

… “In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk. And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the US.”

… “So when HE writes that the US ‘suffered a total defeat’ in Iran that has no precedent in US history and can ‘neither be repaired nor ignored,’ it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.”

… Geopolitical analyst Michael Horowitz: “President Trump says he will speak with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping about arms sales to Taiwan, despite longstanding US policy against consulting Beijing on support to the island.”

… Netanyahu on 60 Minutes last night: "We have seen the deterioration of support for Israel in the US. It correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media. While we were fighting the physical military battle on seven battlefields, 7-front war, we were completely exposed on the 8th front, the media war - really, the social media war."

… Ilan Goldenberg, chief policy officer with J Street:

“Social media has accelerated the trend, but let’s be clear: the collapse of Israel’s standing in the US didn’t just ‘happen’ to Israel. It was the direct result of a series of catastrophic political decisions by Netanyahu over the past decade. Netanyahu chose to drag Israel directly into partisan American politics. Opposing the JCPOA was not itself unique. The Gulf states also disagreed with the deal. But Netanyahu went far beyond policy disagreement.

He organized a speech before Congress behind the back of the sitting American president in order to directly confront Barack Obama and align Israel with one side of America’s political divide. That moment, ten years ago, was the beginning of the end of bipartisan consensus around the US-Israel relationship. It planted the seeds for Israel becoming a partisan issue in American politics.

Netanyahu chose to empower extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in order to maintain power. He helped engineer alliances with them, brought them into the center of Israeli politics, and handed them real authority over national security and settlement policy. The images Americans now see almost daily on social media - violent settler attacks in the West Bank, Ben-Gvir celebrating with a noose cake, a Palestinian journalist emerging from prison emaciated and abused under systems overseen by Ben Gvir’s ministry and being interviewed on CNN. All of that has done enormous damage to Israel’s image.

— Ron Filipkowski

+

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf states; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair. Trump responded by declaring a moratorium on further strikes against Iran’s energy facilities and then declaring a cease-fire, despite Iran’s not having made a single concession.

The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.

If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close. In recent days, Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. You can’t blame him. Hoping for regime collapse is not much of a strategy, especially when the regime has already survived repeated military and economic pummeling. It could fall tomorrow, or six months from now, or not at all. Trump doesn’t have that much time to wait, as oil climbs toward $150 or even $200 a barrel, inflation rises, and global food and other commodity shortages kick in. He needs a faster resolution.

But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante. People talk of a split between hard-liners and moderates in Tehran, but even moderates must understand that Iran cannot afford to let the strait go, no matter how good a deal it thought it could get. For one thing, how reliable is any deal with Trump? He all but boasted of replicating the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by approving the killing of Iran’s leadership amid negotiations. The Iranians cannot be sure that Trump won’t decide to attack again within a few months of striking a deal. They also know that the Israelis may attack again, as they never feel constrained from acting when they perceive their interests to be threatened.

And Israel’s interests will be threatened. As many Iran experts have noted, the regime in Tehran currently stands to emerge from the crisis much stronger than it was before the war, having not only retained its potential nuclear capacity but also gained control of an even more effective weapon: the ability to hold the global energy market hostage. When the Iranians talk of “reopening” the strait, they still mean to keep the strait under their control. Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations. If a nation behaves in a way that Iran’s rulers don’t like, they will be able to exact punishment merely by slowing, or even threatening to slow, the flow of that nation’s cargo ships in and out of the strait.

The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties. Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the future. It may even find itself unable to go after Iran’s proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else.

The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran. As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

Read: America is now a rogue superpower

They will not be the only ones. All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either. The Anglo-French initiative to police the strait after a cease-fire is a bit of a joke. French President Emmanuel Macron has made it clear that this “coalition” will operate only under peaceful conditions in the strait: It will escort ships, but only if they don’t need an escort. Yet with Iran in control, the strait is not going to be safe again for a long time. China presumably has some influence over Tehran, but even China cannot force open the strait by itself.

One effect of this transformation may be an expanding great-power naval race. In the past, most of the world’s nations, including China, counted on the United States to both prevent and address such emergencies. Now the nations in Europe and Asia that depend on access to the Persian Gulf’s resources are helpless against the loss of energy supplies that are vital to their economic and political stability. How long can they tolerate this before they start building their own fleets, as a means of wielding influence in an every-nation-for-itself world where order and predictability have broken down?

The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight. The questions this raises about America’s readiness for another major conflict may or may not prompt Xi Jinping to launch an attack on Taiwan, or Vladimir Putin to step up his aggression against Europe. But at the very least America’s allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.

The global adjustment to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.

(Illustration: Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post)

This opinion column by Robert Kagan reminds us that history appears to be repeating itself. Trump's America First movement is an echo of the 1930s/1940s isolationist, neo-fascist America First movement that tried to keep the U.S. out of WWII. This is a gift🎁link, so you can read the entire article, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post. Below are some excerpts:

Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history....Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did. The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain. [...] This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. [...] Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.”  [...] Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power. [...] Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. [...] The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it. [emphasis added]  

Use the gift link above to read the entire article. It is worth reading.

...This short book is a valuable read and makes a valiant effort to argue for America’s continued deep engagement in the world. I share this sentiment, although this position will have many critics. Aside from the historical narrative that I have sketched above, the book has an important underlying message, one that neoconservatives have made consistently. The world order is not natural; it needed to be built and it needs to be carefully maintained. That it is a liberal world order is far from inevitable. Think, for example, what type of regional or even global order would have been constructed had Hitler won the Second World War? It matters who wins big wars.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

I met Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s new choice for vice president, in the summer of 2022. I was covering a conservative conference in Israel, and Vance was the surprise VIP attraction. We chatted for a bit about the connections between right-wing movements across the world, and what American conservatives could learn from foreign peers. He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed. Yet his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.

Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence. This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares.

The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears. For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration. J.D. Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response. He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.

[...] The Vance of Hillbilly Elegy was very different politically. Back then, he took a conventional conservative line on poverty, describing the working class as beset by a cultural pathology encouraged by federal handouts and the welfare state. 2016 Vance was also an ardent Trump foe. He wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation’s Highest Office,” and wrote a text to his law school roommate warning that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Eight years later, Vance has metamorphosed into something else entirely. Today, he pitches himself as an economic populist and cosponsors legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren curtailing pay for failed bankers. In an even more extreme shift, he has morphed into one of Trump’s leading champions in the Senate — backing the former president to the hilt and even, at times, outpacing him in anti-democratic fervor.

[...] And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war. Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Vance is also an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orbán’s approach to higher education in particular, saying he “made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” The policies in question involve using national dollars to impose state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.

Donald Trump's pick of J.D. Vance to be his ticketmate is about doubling down on MAGA authoritarianism and the "postliberal" worldview.

See Also:

The Dean's Report: JD Vance is worse and more dangerous than you know

Radley Balko at The Watch:

Donald Trump has never had much tolerance for the free press. Throughout his first term he demanded we “open up the libel laws” to make it easier to sue journalists for unflattering coverage — which, more than anything else, reveals that he doesn’t really understand how any of this works. Even if he were able to persuade some red states to pass libel laws more hostile to the press, and even if he could get the Supreme Court to uphold such laws, few public figures would be hit harder by those laws than Donald Trump, who regularly defames his perceived enemies . During his first term Trump also threatened to withhold federal contracts and funding, and to revoke tax incentives from his critics. He repeatedly threatened such repercussions against Jeff Bezos and his various businesses because the Washington Post published investigations into Trump’s incompetence, corruption, and abuse of power. Those threats in and of themselves were likely unconstitutional, even if Trump had never followed up on them.

But the threats also had their intended effect. Bezos intervened to stop the paper from endorsing Trump’s opponent last month, and since the election the billionaire has been tripping over himself to heap praise on the incoming president. Trump has since only doubled down threatening the media. Over the course of his 2024 campaign he threatened to strip legacy broadcasters of their licenses (it’s not clear what that would mean, given that broadcast is all but obsolete), and his surrogates have pushed the absurd idea that unflattering coverage, “biased” debate questions and fact checking, and the edits 60 Minutes made in its interview with Kamala Harris amounted to “illegal in-kind campaign contributions” that could bring criminal liability. Trump now appears ready to make good on many of his campaign threats. Here’s a quick rundown of what to look for.

Civil actions against journalists

We can start with Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 contributor and Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission. Carr has already suggested that the FCC should investigate CBS over the 60 Minutes interview, as well as NBC’s invitation to Harris for a cameo on Saturday Night Live. Carr also wants to impose a partisan, contradictory regulation regime on social media platforms that would basically make it impossible for those platforms to exclude Nazis and white supremacists, harassment, and other objectionable content. It would basically turn every social media site into the cesspool that is X. Carr’s censorious blueprint is based on the theory that the owners of social media platforms have no First Amendment right to run their operations in a way that reflects their own beliefs and values. Carr and his ilk argue that social media sites are the “new public square.” But public squares are, well, public. You’re free to stand on your soapbox and pontificate to your heart’s content. Social media sites are companies. They require servers, paid staff, and other expenses. By Carr’s logic, if a private bookstore or coffee shop also became known for hosting political speakers, they’d be required to host and provide a platform for anyone else who wanted to speak, whether or not the owners agreed with that person’s views.

Trump’s plan to make the Department of Justice his personal, publicly-funded law firm will also have First Amendment ramifications. We’ll likely see him use government personnel and public resources to pursue his personal vendettas against media outlets. Don’t be surprised to see the DOJ or White House legal counsel use taxpayer resources to pursue, for example, the accusations against CBS, Washington Post, and New York Times, in which Trump claims to have suffered Dr. Evil-like damages.

Trump will likely look to red states for other ideas. Florida Republicans have tried to follow Trump’s lead by “opening up” the state’s libel laws to make it easier to sue for defamation. Their aim is to provide a vehicle for the Supreme Court to overturn NYT v. Sullivan. So far, they haven’t been able to get those bills passed. But they’re trying. And at least three Supreme Court justices seem open to the idea. Both Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have opened investigations into the advocacy group Media Matters over its report about paid ads from mainstream companies appearing next to Nazi content on X. To be clear, the Media Matters report is journalism, full stop, and these attempts to silence them to win favor with Elon Musk ought to be as embarrassing as they are illegal (they’re both). Even if none of the Trump administration’s retributive civil actions hold up in court, as we’ve seen with Musk’s own absurd lawsuit against Media Matters, Trump-friendly judges can make investigations and lawsuits as cumbersome and costly as possible. The mere threat of retaliation will likely intimidate some outlets from covering Trump critically. I would hope good journalists and editors would continue to pursue important stories regardless of these threats, but the capitulation we’ve already seen from Bezos, as well as from the corporate owners of Gannet, the L.A. Times, and other papers, bodes ill for the independence of news desks.

Criminalizing journalism

Trump and his allies have made clear that they also plan to target specific journalists. It was only about a year ago that then-Senator JD Vance sent a letter to the DOJ on official letterhead calling for a criminal investigation of journalist Robert Kagan because of a column Kagan wrote for the Washington Post. Ironically, that column was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was arguably the single most censorious act any member of Congress has undertaken in years. The same JD Vance would later deflect Tim Walz’s debate question about January 6th by decrying . . . “censorship.” We know that the first Trump administration was already targeting journalists who cover immigration and the border. Officials kept lists of reporters who covered Trump’s immigration policy skeptically, and singled them out for “secondary screening” when they left and attempted to reenter the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials would later say they were considering opening a criminal investigation into some journalists for possible violations of the federal law that makes it illegal to “encourage or induce an alien to enter the United States.” This is the same law under which some immigration activists have been criminally prosecuted for leaving water out to migrants crossing the dessert.

[...]

Protest

Trump has made clear for decades that he has little tolerance for protest. We know from former aides that during his first term, Trump badly wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring in the military to end the George Floyd demonstrations. We know that on more than one occasion he asked his aides why protesters couldn’t just be shot. We know that he has privately praised dictators in China, Venezuela, and Turkey specifically for their ruthless crackdowns on protest.

Trump was prevented from following through on his worst instincts the first time around by people like former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. In response, Trump publicly suggested that Milley is a traitor who should be executed. If we see protests after the inauguration, Trump will quickly bring in the military. How the public reacts to the ensuing violence will probably determine how violent he’ll get going forward. But Trump and the people who will run his second administration have vowed to make sure there are no Milleys or Espers this time around. Trump has made that clear with his nomination of Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense. In one of his books, helpfully titled American Crusade, Hegseth warned that if Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump supporters would turn to violence, which he argued would be justified. He then wrote: “The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

[...] Expect the Trump administration to defend or, with the help of a Republican Congress, even try to federalize some of the anti-protest legislation we’ve seen from red state lawmakers — policies like “buffer zones” in which members of the public are forbidden from recording law enforcement, limiting the criminal and civil liability of people who strike protesters with their cars, and criminalizing consumer boycotts (but only those that legislators find personally objectionable). I think we’re also likely to see more Republican state legislatures — and possibly Congress — take aim at charitable bail funds. Expect to see federal and state prosecutors go after the people who operate these funds under racketeering and money laundering laws, as we’ve already seen in Georgia. Republicans will claim that these funds are fronts for terrorist groups while also attempting to expand the definition of terrorism to include “antifa,” pro-Palestine organizations, and activist groups like Black Lives Matter.

[...]

Other threats

After decades of complaining (with some merit!) about leftist hegemony on college campuses, conservative activists and Republican governors have fought back with the brute force of state coercion. Republican legislatures in dozens of states have passed bills restricting academic freedom, from banning entire fields of study at state colleges and universities to prohibiting speakers from discussing certain topics, to even barring certain words and phrases from appearing on school websites. As with every other threat to speech we’ve discussed so far, we’re already seeing too many schools preemptively surrender. Just last month, the University of Alabama threatened a professor with termination for organizing a protest against a particularly censorious bill in the state legislature.

Many of these state laws banning DEI and CRT on campus were modeled after an executive order Trump signed in 2020. There’s ample reason to think the new Trump administration will federalize this right-wing holy war on academic freedom. MAGA figures like JD Vance have cited Hungarian President Victor Orbán’s hollowing out of and taking over academia as inspiration. Project 2025 calls for withholding student loan and federal research funding from colleges and universities unless they adopt policies like eradicating DEI programs and prohibiting gender studies, critical race theory, LGTBQ studies, and other subjects that give polemicists like Chris Rufo the vapors. Same for federal contractors, recipients of federal research grants, and anyone else who gets any sort of federal subsidy.

MAGA also seems ready to embrace the idea of compelled speech. Carr, along with several state governors and AGs want to force social media sites to host content they and their users find objectionable. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced he’s opening a separate investigation into companies that don’t want to advertise on racist and far-right social media sites, either. Apparently, it’s a crime to not give Elon Musk your advertising dollars. Republican attorneys general are also using antitrust laws to silence corporate activism on issues like climate change.

Paxton and two dozen other Republican AGs also filed yet another anti-speech lawsuit, this one against against Yelp, for publishing information (that happened to also be true) that he believes to be critical of crisis pregnancy centers. As with the attack on Media Matters, the AGs are trying to silence the site under consumer protection laws. As the Reporters Committee for a Free Press warns, “The application of consumer protection laws in the context of editorial decisions — by any private speaker — is dangerous. And Texas has articulated no limiting principle that would preclude the application of the state’s consumer protection law against members of the press on a similar theory.”

Project 2025 also calls for prohibiting a list of terms and phrases from being published in any federal document. Incredibly, it also calls for retroactively removing those terms from existing documents. In the introduction to the blueprint, former Heritage head Kevin Roberts calls for the elimination of the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights,” and, in a particularly Orwellian twist, “any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights.” It’s striking just how quickly the right shifted from complaining about soft censorship and content moderation on social media sites to sheer joy over the prospect of using state power shutting down dissent and silence critics. After Musk purchased Twitter, he converted the enormously influential platform into a bustling Nazi bar and far-right arm of the Trump campaign. The site is all but unusable now. For all the right’s complaints about throttling and “shadow bans,” Musk’s prioritization of accounts that pay him has effectively shunted anyone who isn’t echoing Musk’s own politics to the margins. It also means the top replies to every post tend to be racist, bigoted, trollish, or grievance-fueled garbage.

More recently, Musk has been joking/not joking about purchasing MSNBC and converting it into yet another right-wing outlet. This — along with the editorial interference of newspapers owners who are worried about government sanctions of their other businesses, is also classic authoritarian maneuvering. In Russia, Putin quickly realized that he could control newspapers and media outlets two ways — by pressuring their owners’ other business interests, and just by having his oligarch cronies simply buy them up and convert them into government mouthpieces. (He soon found it was easier to just arrange for critical journalists to fall out of windows — a habit Trump has had difficulty criticizing.) The same thing is happening in Hungary under Orbán. Setting aside whether or not Musk could actually buy MSNBC, his mere mention of the idea had right-wing personalities salivating at the idea of subverting a leading left-of-center outlet into the right-wing echo chamber.

That glee stems from a belief that conservative voices have been silenced by left-wing control of the media. This is self-evidently false. It is true that those newsrooms that still attempt to be accurate and fair — to deliver “straight news” — are disproportionately left-leaning. But it’s also true that the right has successfully created its own media ecosystem that’s wholly independent of those newsrooms, and can now bypass them entirely to get information to its audience. The sheer giddiness on display from the people about to take over the government at the prospect of snuffing these newsrooms out is alarming. Adding to the problem, Project 2025 also calls for targeting public broadcasting. That’s a longtime conservative hobbyhorse, but it would do the most harm to local public radio — not the national NPR programs that irk conservatives — and it will hit hardest in areas that lack daily newspapers.

[...]

Finally, there’s the threat to nonprofits. Here, too, the Democrats have utterly failed to prepare for the gravity of the threat. Last month, 15 House Democrats joined Republicans to pass a bill called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. That’s far fewer than originally supported the law, which was introduced to target groups who advocate for Palestine. It was still 15 too many. The sweeping law would give the Treasury Secretary the power to unilaterally declare any nonprofit a “supporter of terrorism.” Trump could effectively shut down nonprofits for the flimsiest of reasons, from the ACLU to Planned Parenthood to ProPublica. Beyond the screaming unconstitutionality and general un-Americanness of it all, it’s just a breathtakingly stupid policy for any Democrat to support, especially just months before a man hellbent on vengeance and retribution takes over the White House.

If you hear Republicans claiming that Trump was just joking about being a dictator, ask them this:

What would be your reaction if Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Gavin Newsom started talking about being dictators?

Trump's lickspittles continue to make excuses for his proposed totalitarianism and even push the envelope further.

MAGA Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio is asking the Department of Justice to investigate Robert Kagan of the Washington Post because Kagan wrote that Democratic office holders should wage legal resistance against Trump if the latter returns to power. The irony is that Kagan is a G.H.W. Bush style conservative who served in the Reagan-era State Department. Vance is helping to prove that worry about a Trump dictatorship is well placed.

Historian and foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan at the Washington Post on the need to take action now to prevent a behemoth constitutional crisis in late 2024 after the presidential election.

The US Constitution has some notable gaps in it. The Founders did not anticipate the bizarre situation we’re now in.

Kagan feels that the future of American democracy is in the hands of the Senate’s “Constitutional Republicans” who voted for Trump’s second impeachment. He writes in his essay:

We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.