President Trump got some decent news on the inflation and jobs front in the January data. There are signs that the January jobs number may just be a positive blip in an overall downcast trend from 2025. The cooling inflation numbers may be offset by price hikes from manufacturers who have been holding off on passing on tariff costs until the new year. Still, for a president with sinking popularity, those numbers are better than nothing. And yet, despite some nods to affordability, there’s really little evidence that Trump is in any way shifting course or doing anything likely to shift the downward pressure on public support which threatens to wash away Republicans’ congressional majorities in November. They made some nods to that in Minneapolis. But we can be confident now that it’s window dressing on a mass deportation program that remains intact and bounding forward. On the contrary, everything we see suggests a pedal-to-the-metal, double-down approach. The main effort focused on the election is not one focused on increasing public support but putting a thumb on the scales with the administration’s so-called SAVE Act to suppress the vote. Everything points to a collision between these two forces, Trump and the American public, in November.

I got a number of fascinating replies to yesterday’s post about the federal calendar and presidential holidays, specifically whether we should ditch Columbus Day in favor of a national holiday celebrating Abraham Lincoln. I also learned a bit more about how Lincoln never got a national holiday originally because the states of the old Confederacy, whose representatives and senators had outsized seniority throughout the 20th century, simply wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed, the 1968 federal law which clustered federal holidays into long weekends and which in effect though not formally consolidated Washington’s birthday into “President’s Day” was still under the shadow of southern resistance to anything commemorating Abraham Lincoln.

When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s, there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that Presidents Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as Presidents Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)

In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.

Yesterday, one of ICE’s and the White House’s prize ICE-as-victim cases blew up. We’ve seen a version of this happen before. The story is pushed on Fox. Charges follow. But as it begins to make its way through the courts, it falls apart and the charges are more or less quietly dropped. We’ve seen so, so many of these cases where it’s clear that what the ICE agents said just wasn’t true. I don’t even have to tell you about some of the more obscure ones. Though they didn’t get to charges since the purported attackers were already dead, you can see the pattern in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. First, the story was that protestors were trying to kill ICE agents and the agents barely emerged alive. Then we see the video and none of that is true. The key, though, is that in those cases where charges were filed, it’s always no harm no foul. The claims of ICE agents are shown to have been false, but it’s on to the next wilding spree. There are no consequences. Not for the original behavior. Not for lying about it.

But yesterday something different happened. The DOJ went into court and asked that a set of charges be dismissed with prejudice, i.e., they can’t be filed again. And the reason was this sentence that’s been rattling around my head for the last 24 hours. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit.”

Yesterday, we talked about the global Authoritarian Movement or Authoritarian International (with the convenient acronym “AI”). Today, I wanted to talk about something slightly more specific. It’s part of the same phenomenon, perhaps a subset of it, but it’s distinct.

Back during Trump’s first term, people in the anti-Trump world became intensely, if superficially, engaged with the inner-workings of Russia under Vladimir Putin, particularly the aggressive use of influence and disruption operations in competitor states, as well as the use of “kompromat” to maintain control over Russian oligarchs and key people — allies and enemies — abroad. One of the features of that world is that it’s really not extortion. It can be an oddly stabilizing system because everyone kind of has something on everyone else. In any case, this became a big part of the Trump opposition world during Trump’s first term. What did Putin have on Trump? What did he want? When did it start?

Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.

One issue we’ve discussed again and again during the Trump years is the purported belief as a form of performative aggression. It’s something essential to the Trumpian/MAGA world. You believe things that are, in factual terms, obviously absurd. But they’re also convenient. They create permission structures for all sorts of things they already want to do. To an important degree the absurdity of the professed belief is part of the attraction, especially since aggression is so deeply embedded in the professed belief. This issue comes up in a less extreme, though still similar, way in the various ways Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration try to justify ICE’s behavior.

Let’s start with masking.

We know their basic argument. There are legions of anti-ICE activists. If ICE agents don’t obscure their faces, they risk being “doxxed.” Set aside whether this is a justification for masking. This doesn’t seem crazy on its face. Demanding legal accountability for ICE agents is near the top of all anti-ICE activism. And the more radical activists can be quite aggressive in their tactics. So could this have happened? Of course. But what journalist Philip Bump was able to determine is that “doxxing,” the notional rationale for ICE masking has in fact never happened. Not once. It’s important to note what definition we’re using here. As Bump puts it, “At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked. While there have been threats issued against agents and incidents of off-duty harassment, there are no known incidents in which an officer was assaulted while off-duty because he was identified as a federal agent.”

A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.

I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.

I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.

That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.

Last Friday, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a GOP campaign consultant named Brad Todd. He says he’s the one who coined that phrase about taking Trump “literally but not seriously.” The big argument of the piece I think actually makes no sense or represents a kind of denial. But there are building blocks to it that capture key insights about immigration policy in the United States. The gist of Todd’s argument is that Trump’s immigration agenda was a big political winner in 2024 and has actually been very successful in practice — dramatically reducing the number of entries via the southern border. The problem is that it’s being overshadowed and the support for it is being wrecked by Trump sending ICE on these wilding sprees into blue cities.

My view is a bit different. I don’t know if Todd is in denial or willfully obtuse or maybe less than fully leveling with readers. But I don’t think this is actually what’s happening. Nobody foisted Stephen Miller or the whole “mass deportation” policy on Trump. Other than perhaps the concept of tariffs it’s the most organic and natural thing to him. It’s more accurate to say that the energy of MAGA is all about mass deportation and perhaps even more than mass deportation the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are “illegal” and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again. “Closing the border” or “securing the border” is just the packaging the gets you electorally to 50%. Because that’s something quite a lot of Americans for a variety of reasons want to do. In other words, wilding sprees aren’t inadvertently driving down support for Trump immigration policies. The actual MAGA policy is “mass deportation” and ICE wilding sprees and it’s unpopular. The border rhetoric is popular but that’s neither here nor there.