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Sunday Dose of Democracy:
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump snaps in hysterical ballroom meltdown
A federal judge has halted construction of Trump's precious ballroom, the only thing he seems to really care about...and Dementia Donny is absolutely losing his shit.
Lee Zeldin is the most lethally boring man in the Trump administration
Liza Featherstone, The New Republic: "Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, reportedly being considered to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general, is not the most polarizing member of the Trump administration, not by a long shot. Yet he’s one of the most dangerous. In contrast to the mutant plastic visage of Kristi Noem, you probably can’t call up a visual mental image of Zeldin’s eminently forgettable face. It’s also hard to call to mind any memorable utterances by Zeldin. That’s an achievement in a crowd that normally will not shut up.
But all this masks a truly extreme anti-environmental record at the EPA thus far—one that the nation’s premier pollution fans are ecstatic about. He has cut billions of dollars from climate grants the Biden administration had awarded, eviscerated pollution rules and enforcement capacity, and perhaps most significantly, wiped out the legal basis of much climate regulation: the 2009 endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases can be regulated because they imperil human life and health.
But the toll on bodies—the sheer loss of life—will be greater still. The January announcement that the EPA will no longer consider lives saved when setting pollution rules is not only ghoulish in its logic but will make it harder to regulate numerous pollutants, including greenhouse gases, and will exacerbate deadly climate-related disasters like wildfires, which kill people both directly and indirectly, through damage to infrastructure as well as long-term health effects. None of this can simply be reversed with a stroke of a pen by subsequent administrations: Humans and ecosystems that die will stay dead. The obvious, loud, vulgar, sensationalistic evil of much of the Trump Cabinet is a liability for Trump in this attention economy, when a creepy appearance or one callous comment can become infamous on social media within minutes.
But what if—think of the stereotypical serial killer—it’s the quiet ones we need to worry about? The Stephen Millers and Pam Bondis do deserve our ire, but perhaps we should fear Zeldin’s boring, methodical destruction of our natural environment, our government institutions, and our regard for human life even more. Don’t be fooled. "
Take Action: Make Trader Joe's a sanctuary from ICE's violence!
Beloved Alaskan Mary Peltola SURGES in the race for critical red Senate seat
Mary Peltola for Alaska: Former Congresswoman Mary Peltola sent shockwaves through American politics when she won the only congressional seat in deep-red Alaska in 2022. Now she’s running for the US Senate seat held by MAGA millionaire Dan Sullivan. A new poll shows she's engineered a TEN-POINT swing and now leads the race by 5%! A proven winner like Peltola with an Alaska First platform of “fish, family, and freedom” is just the candidate we need to flip this critical seat and retake the Senate. Will you chip in to help push her over the finish line?
How Trump keeps getting away with blasphemy
Chris Lehmann, The Nation: "Taking a break from convulsing the news cycle with nonsensical ultimatums about the Iran war, President Donald Trump elected to stir things up at the start of the week by posting an image of himself as Jesus on his Truth Social account. That now-infamous depiction came in the wake of a long screed Trump posted the day before assailing Pope Leo XIV for his dissension from the illegal attack on Iran. The general run of dazed commentary about Trump’s self-deifying display grouped it together with other Trump-branded power plays; as the Son of God, Trump could clearly claim to outrank the lowly pontiff. After evangelical and Catholic detractors properly called out the post as blasphemy, Trump finally took it down, and the backlash from diehard Trump devotees on the religious right seemed poised to dissipate, in keeping with thousands of other episodes of Trump-centric transgression.
But Trump’s half-assed evasions aren’t enough to shore up his central role in MAGA mythology as a righteous force of deliverance, vengeance, and redemption.
That’s where MAGA’s evangelical wing—far and away the most ardent partner in the Trump coalition—comes in. Faced, during Trump’s first campaign, with a presidential standard-bearer who was a sociopathic bully and a confessed serial sexual assaulter, evangelical apologists for Trump jury-rigged a crude, but still notionally biblical, basis for supporting him. The cumulative impact of all this crass spiritual self-aggrandizing may now shock the evangelical conscience after surfacing with a presidential imprimatur, but all of its components were firmly entrenched in MAGA circles long before the president decided it was a good idea to flame the pope. As Sharlet explained in 2024, when I interviewed him about Trump’s post-January 6 spiritual persona, “When you think of the Christian iconography of Trump, he is the Jesus figure on a tank.
Or maybe there’s a Jesus figure hovering somewhere behind him, but Trump is always the focus. It’s an incarnation.” And as Trump’s own governing agenda careens into quasi-apocalyptic global confrontations and fruitless bids to reclaim momentum in his fracturing coalition, Trump needs to recur to the dominant image of himself as national savior—though at this point, it’s likely a maneuver that reassures him more than an increasingly restive and disaffected evangelical following. And even a raging narcissist like Trump has to know by now that he can’t afford to aggrandize himself at the expense of the evangelical army now amassed behind him; just two days after he was forced to remove his Trump-as-Jesus post, he launched a new Truth Social salvo depicting him enclosed in Jesus’ embrace.
What secular liberals who read all of Trump’s religious pronouncements as unhinged hubris don’t understand is that such overtures, nakedly desperate and craven though they are, actually work. They reinscribe the image of Trump, the longtime sex-pest crony of Jeffrey Epstein, as the heroic scourge of “satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters.” They reassure grievance-addicted believers that Trump is not only one of them but the foreordained agent of their deliverance—a righteous warrior who is poised to stage the ultimate act of divine retribution by waging an end-time holy war in Iran. Most of all, they posit Trump’s movement as the vanguard force that will visit richly earned eternal suffering on the far-flung defilers of just scriptural rule; that is the point at which the casually cruel Trump we recognize in Andrew Harnick’s photo achieves a kind of postmodern transubstantiation, and merges indistinguishably with the evangelically sanctioned image of Trump as Jesus on a tank. After all, as the Book of Matthew said, Jesus preached faith in a God for whom all things are possible."
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A major US court case could help fix the ills of Citizens United
David Sirota, The Guardian: "Slush funds of anonymous unregulated money are now the dominant institutions in American politics, converting our elections into auctions – and transforming the legislative process into a donor bidding war. In the last election, Pacs and Super Pacs spent more money to buy federal elections than all candidate campaigns combined. One in every $5 flowing through a Super Pac came from organizations that do not disclose their donors. In all, $2bn of 'independent' spending was dark money, meaning the public cannot see who is buying elections – even though politicians know exactly who they owe once they are in office.
The current election cycle promises to be even worse: Super Pacs have already spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, fueled by donors in the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries demanding policy favors from Washington. Again, much of it is anonymous cash: for example, new campaign finance filings show the second-largest donors to House and Senate Republicans’ Super Pacs are dark money groups. Polls show most of us hate this system and know that Citizens United v FEC helped create it. But most don’t know that the notorious 2010 supreme court decision was only one of two legal doctrines creating this pay-to-play griftopia. And almost nobody remembers that the other lesser-known doctrine has never actually been tested at the high court, because justice department officials never challenged it when they had the chance.
But ahead of the midterms and the 2028 presidential race, this legal void could finally be filled – thanks to a Maine lawsuit that has suddenly become the most significant anti-corruption battle inside America’s legal system. The 2010 Citizens United decision, written by the former corporate lobbyist Justice Anthony Kennedy, is known for striking down limits on spending by Super Pacs and declaring: 'Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.' The sheer gall of that decision overshadowed an equally far-reaching lower-court decision two months later: SpeechNow v FEC, which struck down limits on contributions to those Super Pacs.
In 2024, voters from the New England state overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure placing limits on contributions to Super Pacs. The initiative was quickly challenged in court by what we at the Lever call the master planners – the conservative groups that have successfully deregulated campaign finance laws over the last 50 years. This battle is one of a number of promising new campaign finance initiatives aimed at forcing greater disclosure of election spending and restricting oligarchs’ outsized power in politics. And though Maine’s case will never be a panacea, it is a rare and real counteroffensive to the 50-year master plan."
"I felt I was a monster:" IDF soldiers talk about the "moral injury" – and the silence
Tom Levinson, Haaretz: "Yuval sits biting his nails, his legs fidgety. It's noon in Tel Aviv and the street is full of people. Sometimes he looks around, anxiously scanning the people passing by. 'Sorry,' he says. 'My biggest fear is a vendetta.' But Yuval wasn't born into a crime family. And he's not a criminal. He's 34, grew up in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon, and became a computer programmer. Until recently, he worked at one of the world's biggest high-tech companies, but he hasn't gone there for months. 'I was in hell, but I wasn't aware of it,' he says.
The hell he's talking about took place in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza back when he was a soldier in December 2023. The questions will only come and haunt him months later. 'I don't have good answers; I don't have any answers at all. There's no forgiving what I've done. No atonement.'
It happened near Salah al-Din Road, Gaza's main highway. Using a drone, one platoon noticed suspicious figures. Yuval's unit charged. 'I was firing like a madman, like they teach you in platoon drills in basic training,' he says. 'When we got to our destination, I realized that these weren't terrorists. It was an old guy and three boys, maybe teenagers. Not one of them was armed. But their bodies were riddled with bullets; their organs were pouring out. I had never seen anything like that so close up. 'I remember there was silence; nobody uttered a word. Then the battalion commander came over with his people and one spat on the bodies and yelled, 'This is what happens to anybody who messes with Israel, you sons of bitches.' I was in shock, but I kept quiet because I'm a loser, just a gutless coward.'
Yuval was discharged about three months later. He took two weeks off and went back to his job. 'They threw a party for me when I was discharged, applauded me and called me a hero,' he says. 'But I felt I was a monster. I couldn't bear the things they said to me. I felt they didn't realize that I wasn't a good person; just the opposite...Maybe in some way I want to die, to get it over with. I don't kill myself because I promised my mother, but I admit I don't know how long I can keep it up.' Two days after speaking with Haaretz, Yuval was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward."
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The Sunday wrap-up
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