Editors’ Blog
Due to scheduling conflicts, The Josh Marshall Podcast will be out tomorrow, Thursday, March 26, instead of our usual Wednesday drop.
We hope to see you all tonight for our members’ happy hour in NYC!
Notes on Trump II, Month 3. How Long Do We Have to Keep Lifting? So Long. 
A few days ago a friend told me that Chuck Schumer thinks he’s a minority leader but he’s actually an opposition leader. Or rather that’s the position into which history has placed him — and he doesn’t realize it or he doesn’t grasp the difference or he’s simply not able to be the latter thing. There are lots of ways to explain the disconnect or incapacity. But I thought this was a pretty good one.
Last night, in this vein, I suddenly realized there’s a backed-up line of incapacity, a traffic jam of it.
I watched the reaction to President Trump’s latest salvo, an executive order purporting to upend key elements of election administration in the United States. People have to prove citizenship to register to vote, it says. No states can accept votes by mail after Election Day — and much more. The country’s most prestigious news organizations rushed to report these as fait accomplis. The Times announced that, henceforth, Americans would have to provide proof of citizenship to vote. The Post was more or less the same.
Read MoreDemocrat James Malone just pulled off a narrow victory in a Pennsylvania state Senate special election in a bright red district where Trump won resoundingly with 57% of the vote last November. The 36th district hasn’t elected a Democrat since it moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster County in 1979, according to Lancaster Online. Malone made Musk and recent events in Washington, DC a central part of his campaign.
Let me take a moment to flag your attention to the stunning deterioration of U.S. relations with Canada. Yes, you know about the tariff fight and the fact that the U.S. national anthem gets routinely booed at NHL hockey games. But a few additional points. The Canadian Liberals were on track for a massive drubbing in an election that had to happen soon. It’s not even really ideological. The Liberals had been in power for a decade. They’ve seen the country through the pandemic and it’s aftermath. All those parties are unpopular. Ask Joe Biden. They were behind by like 25 points. Now eight weeks later, solely and entirely because of a wave of defensive (in both senses of the term) nationalism driven by Donald Trump, the Liberals look on track to win an outright majority.
Defending the country against the United States is now the sole issue in Canadian politics.
Read MoreAs I mentioned in last night’s post, security against malign actors isn’t the only or probably even the worst part of what we can now call the Signal scandal. Using Signal, in their case, is really an effort to conceal activity from the US government – with all that entails. But I’ve learned there’s another level of the scandal: the DOD recently sent around an “OPSEC SPECIAL BULLETIN” specifically warning about a new Signal exploit using a phishing-like strategy to add ‘linked devices’ to Signal communications and thus listen in on encrypted messages. The bulletin specifically notes the use by “Russian professional hacking groups.”
SignalGate Is Bad; But OPSEC Isn’t Even the Worst Part Of It
I haven’t had time to comment on the Jeff Goldberg story about the war cabinet planning a military campaign on the Signal app. So a few brief thoughts.
To state the obvious, in any normal administration Hegseth and Waltz at a minimum would be gone by the end of the day. So let me stipulate to all the outrageousness. But I want to focus your attention on the fact that information security is not the only, perhaps not even the main issue.
Note that no one in the chat is saying, “Hey, we sure it’s cool to be talking about this on Signal?” Or, “Should we be worried this is an insecure channel?” That and the simple logic of the matter tells us this is commonplace in the new administration. You think Mike Waltz got fat fingers and accidentally added Goldberg on the first time out? Not likely.
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Speculations at the Outer Bounds of the Constitutional Order
I wanted to take a moment to set out some thoughts about the outer bounds of constitutional government in the United States, just where and at what point the American Republic might come apart or temporarily unhinged and how, potentially, to navigate such a situation.
For starters, where does the break point come? It seems clear to me that Trump plans to coerce the states into operating under his direct control by cutting off their flows of federal money from the federal government. We have already seen this with private institutions like Columbia University and other institutions in the form of NIH and other grants. Maine is already a focus because of the verbal confrontation between the state’s Gov. Janet Mills (D) and Trump back in late February.
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Schumer Didn’t Know the Can of Whoop-Ass He Was Opening
I don’t want to say I told you so. Because lots of people were saying similar things. But I think I was right when I said that Chuck Schumer didn’t grasp the magnitude or the intensity of the fissure he was opening up in the Democratic Party with his handling of the Musk/Trump continuing resolution. (I said he was like one of those Chernobyl victims who’s already been fatally irradiated but seems fine. Radiation poisoning takes a few days to get you.) They thought it was just the online resistance types acting up and wanting a fight. They didn’t understand the depth of it. I’m pretty certain Schumer didn’t think he’d still be making the rounds of the morning shows going on two weeks later trying to hold on to his job.
In my mind, the real failure wasn’t even so much the one people watched play out a week ago. The real failure was in the preceding six weeks. I still think they should have refused the continuing resolution for all the reasons we discussed at the time. But by that time the Democrats really were in a jam. By laying no groundwork for the coming confrontation, they’d made it a much harder choice. In the internal hand-wringing I picked up in the 24 hours before Schumer’s cave, people were saying, “Yeah, we should be fighting. But it’s basically too late.”
Read MoreThey’re happening: “empty chair” town halls in Republican districts pretty much all over the place. This weekend we’ve got reports in Columbus, Ohio, for Sens. Moreno and Husted, on Maryland’s eastern shore, where Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) had to show up in place of Rep. Andy Harris (R), in Little Rock for Rep. French Hill, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. John Boozman, and in Lexington for Rep. Andy Barr. In Billings, nearly 1,000 showed up for no-shows Sen. Daines, Sen. Sheehy and Rep. Downing, and about 300 came for Daines, Sheehy and Rep. Zinke in Missoula. People turned out in Fairbanks, Juneau, Anchorage and other towns in Alaska for no-shows Rep. Begich and Sen. Sullivan. Another big turnout for no-show Rep. Darrell Issa outside San Diego. More “empty chair” town halls in Indiana, with no-shows from Sen. Banks, Sen. Young and Rep. Stutzman. (Banks sent donuts.)
Read MoreThe Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.