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Trump Is Already Telling Us He Will Steal the Midterms (If We Let Him)
If this sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it once before.
Jun 15, 2026
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.
Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.
They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.
The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.
The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.
The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.
These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.
If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.
Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd that :
“[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”
He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.
A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.
And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported this morning:
“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”
Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.
He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.
He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.
Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.
So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”
It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked ninety years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.
The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.
When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.
Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.
The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.
Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.
He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.
Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.
I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.
The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.
You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.
And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.
That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.
When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.
In a contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.
Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.
But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.
If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.
The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least twelve thousand eligible voters were wrongly purged, twenty-two times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were eleven percent of the electorate and forty-one percent of the people thrown off the rolls.
Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.
That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.
When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.
That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”
But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.
The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.
The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.
A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.
Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”
These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.
The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.
So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.
Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.
Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.
Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.
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'Travesty of Justice': UK Appeals Court Slammed for Upholding Ban on Palestine Action
"Classifying protest through direct action as terrorism brings Parliament and our judicial system into disrepute," said one Labour MP.
Jun 15, 2026
A UK appeals court is being accused of flouting the law to allow the government to suppress free speech after it upheld a ban on the direct action group Palestine Action.
Just days after four young activists with the group were hit with unprecedented “terrorism” sentences over their 2024 vandalism of an Israeli-owned weapons facility that was being used to supply the genocidal assault on Gaza, the Court of Appeal in London on Monday upheld the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act of 2000.
The ban was approved in Parliament in July 2025 and outlawed expressions of support for the group. According to Amnesty International, more than 3,300 people have been arrested across Britain since last July "simply for their engagement in acts of peaceful protest opposing the proscription"—including more than 2,000 who have been arrested simply for holding signs that read "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where the decision was handed down, hundreds more Britons rallied in opposition.
“We acknowledge the Court of Appeal’s judgment that the home secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was lawful,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement shortly after. “This means that expressing support for the organization remains a criminal offense, and officers will arrest those who break the law.”
“Officers are policing a protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice today where a number of people are displaying placards in support of Palestine Action," it continued. "Arrests are underway.”
Protesters were carried away, while onlookers shouted, “Shame” and “You’re complicit” at officers.
Arrests continue outside the Royal Courts of Justice after Court of Appeal find proscription of Palestine Action to be lawful.
We will continue to protest this Government’s embarrassing attempts to cover up its crimes with intimidation tactics.
Join us: https://t.co/XhFvPsZC3U pic.twitter.com/9okcFkVVtf
— Defend Our Juries (@DefendOurJuries) June 15, 2026
As The New York Times pointed out:
Palestine Action, which no longer exists in its original form, did not promote violence against individuals. But its members damaged sites linked to Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer, and last June broke into [Royal Air Force] Brize Norton, Britain’s largest air force base, in Oxfordshire, vandalizing two aircraft.
The activists who were given hefty sentences on Friday have argued that “innocent lives were saved” by their destruction of military equipment in the Elbit facility. Drones manufactured by the company have been documented in use during attacks on civilians, including the April 2024 strike on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers.
But although members of the group have never been accused of any premeditated act of violence against other human beings, the British government’s terror designation puts it on the same level, legally speaking, as al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, and expressions of support can carry maximum sentences of 14 years in prison.
In February, the High Court sided with Palestine Action, ruling that the ban on support breached the rights to free expression and assembly under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
However, a five-judge appeals court panel overruled this decision on Monday, with Chief Justice Sue Carr writing that while the ban was “highly controversial,” and that the group “was supported by many otherwise law-abiding citizens,” it was a “fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promoted unlawful violence amounting to terrorism.”
Pointing to its sabotage of Elbit, she said the group's actions were “intended to close down lawful businesses” and said that "future threats and risks posed to third-party individuals and property by Palestine Action were perhaps the most important factors to weigh in the balance.”
Carr said that the ban would "not prevent public expressions of support for the Palestinian cause or opposition to Israel and to the Israel Defense Forces, or demonstrations targeted at Elbit."
But in the process, even she acknowledged that such a severe restriction on peaceful assembly in support of Palestine Action could indeed have a "chilling effect" on otherwise law-abiding citizens and cause them to be "deterred from assembling lawfully or making their strongly held anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian views public for fear of their actions being construed as support for Palestine Action."
Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, who challenged the ban in court, said her group would "fight this all the way" and planned to appeal to the UK Supreme Court and potentially even the European Court of Human Rights.
"We will not stop fighting to overturn one of the most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern British history," she said. "This unprecedented abuse of power has devastated the lives of thousands of people while silencing dissent over Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people during the genocide, when that dissent could not be more urgent.”
Today's ruling by the Court of Appeal is deeply disappointing.
This case remains about much more than one group.
What’s important for all of us to understand is that proscription is one of the strongest powers the government has.
Treating protest as terrorism leaves the… pic.twitter.com/WI3O05LYEn
— Amnesty UK (@AmnestyUK) June 15, 2026
The ruling was met with outrage from supporters of Palestinian rights and human rights groups.
Ammar Kazmi, the senior legal coordinator for the Derby-based Left Legal Fighting Fund, said that with this ruling, the judges allowed the political objective of criminalizing pro-Palestine speech to take precedence over the law.
"The judges allowed policy reasons to override strictly legal arguments, and they showed deference to ‘national security’ questions," he wrote on social media. "They also said that proscription is a ‘proportionate’ interference with free speech rights. In other words, they allowed the government to ride roughshod over the law."
Amnesty UK called the ruling "deeply disappointing," adding that the case "remains about much more than one group."
"What’s important for all of us to understand is that proscribing a group as a terrorist organization is one of the strongest powers the government has," the human rights group said. "The banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization is a grave misuse of counterterrorism powers with serious consequences for human rights."
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn—whose successor, Prime Minister Keir Starmer—enacted the ban, said, "Today’s ruling to uphold the UK government's proscription of Palestine Action is a travesty of justice."
"One by one, the very foundations of our democracy are being destroyed—all to oil the wheels of British complicity in genocide," said Corbyn, who is leading an unofficial "tribunal" that presented evidence of UK participation in Israel's assault on Gaza to the International Criminal Court in March.
Noting the large number of pensioners who have been hauled off by police for holding protest signs opposing the ban—including dozens arrested on Friday for opposing the sentencing of those involved in the Elbit raid—Labour MP John McDonnell said, "Parliament should reverse the decision to proscribe Palestine Action urgently before we see large numbers of elderly people in particular being dragged before our courts."
He added that "classifying protest through direct action as terrorism brings Parliament and our judicial system into disrepute."
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‘Alarm’ at White House After Vance and Miller Pushed Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension During Anti-ICE Protests
Reporting in The New York Times reveals Vance wanted to use the military "to crush the unrest in Minnesota."
Jun 15, 2026
A Monday report in The New York Times revealed what it described as the "alarm" felt by some White House lawyers at proposals made earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance and Trump adviser Stephen Miller as the administration was forced to contend with widespread anger over its anti-immigration agenda.
Among other things, the Times reported that Vance pushed for President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the US military to be deployed on American streets, in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota against federal immigration enforcement operations in the state.
A few days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers fatally shot demonstrator Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the Times reported that Vance—who had also elevated a baseless claim by Miller that Pretti had been a "would-be assassin"—said invoking the Insurrection Act was necessary "to crush the unrest in Minnesota."
Vance also believed invoking the law would send a “message” that “paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations”—even though, as the Times noted, there is no evidence that Pretti; demonstrator Renee Good, who was also killed by federal agents; or any other organizers in Minnesota or elsewhere received any money in exchange for protesting.
However, right-wing attorney Will Scharf quickly shot down Vance's suggestion, noting that the Insurrection Act is an instrument aimed at putting down armed rebellions rather than groups of citizens blowing whistles at ICE officers.
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair then made the political case against invoking the Insurrection Act.
"The scenes of federal agents in Minnesota already looked chaotic, he said, and the public was recoiling," reported the Times. "He put three questions to the room: What does the Insurrection Act give us that we don’t already have? What changes on the ground would be worth the heat? What else could they win that would justify the public relations cost?"
"The room was quiet," the Times added. "Nobody had a good answer."
The Times report also revealed that Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Trump's homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants, which would give the administration the power to carry out mass deportations without being subjected to judicial oversight.
As in the case of Vance's proposal, Scharf pushed back against Miller's suggestion, noting that courts have long held that habeas corpus cannot be suspended unilaterally by the president and must be done by an act of Congress.
"Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights," Scharf wrote in a legal memo obtained by the Times, "the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the Times' reporting showed Miller "would happily shred the Constitution into little pieces if he could," before hopefully noting that "even he wasn’t powerful enough to do it" in this instance.
University of Michigan Law School Professor Leah Litman argued that the Times report showed some in the administration were at least still somewhat conscious of public opinion when making decisions.
"In the story about the administration weighing suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act, what moved the needle against the Insurrection Act was concern about 'public relations,'" Litman wrote. "Public pushback, agitation, and outcry can work. Even now. Keep it up."
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Trump, Musk, and the Age of the Super Asshole
The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men—and how horrible and cruel they are as people—is evidence of how far we’ve fallen.
Jun 15, 2026
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.
Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.
Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)
Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.
Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.
To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”
Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.
In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.
Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.
Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.
Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”
Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”
Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny.
Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights.
Musk, too, has faced frequent claims of misogyny and sexism. Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit detailing a pervasive “’Animal House’” culture — accusing Musk of creating a hostile environment, treating female employees as sexual objects, and retaliating when employees challenged his sexism. Separate reports have also emerged alleging that Musk engaged in inappropriate relationships and persistent advances toward employees, including asking them to bear his children.
Musk has 14 kids with different mothers, and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles.
*. *. *
The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?
Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame, and a disintegration of public morality — which has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.
The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”— not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”
To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad.
But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good.
Subsequently, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required that we work together for the common good. Many of us — both white and black Americans — were motivated to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And a sense of common good moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.
Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age.
This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.
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