The Situation: Just Asking Questions II
Ten questions that will condition the next several months of American life.
The Situation on Wednesday translated Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference into plain, simple English.
Today, I am just asking questions—again.
Specifically, I have a list of ten questions on my mind—both as a citizen and as the editor of the publication that covers The Situation—as I contemplate the next few months of American politics and law:
Imagine you are a malevolent despot who wants to rig the midterm elections. How would you do it? What specific steps would you actually take? It’s not enough to make some noises on a podcast about nationalizing elections, though that’s enough to send lots of commentators into a panic. You have to actually do things. What would you do?
A variety of investigations of a variety of conspiracy theories have materialized in a variety of locations around the country. There is a Fulton County investigation, for example, and a Grand Conspiracy investigation. There are a bunch of others too. How does the administration leverage these for maximum negative impact on its political enemies given that the facts simply will not support sustainable criminal charges? Is the goal mere harassment? Is the Justice Department high on its own supply? Or is there some other objective at work?
ICE violence against protestors turns out—unsurprisingly, really—to be unpopular politically, as does massive ICE presence in urban areas and house-to-house sweeps that infringe on the rights of lots of people, aliens and U.S. citizens alike. So what is the next act for The Situation’s cadre of third-rate Janissaries? The administration hasn’t built this corps not to use it aggressively. But Minneapolis led to a humiliating climb-down for the administration, as did Chicago. And the administration is also losing a lot of litigation and suffering in the polls as a result of ICE activity. So what comes next? How does the administration continue to deploy this tool without damaging itself politically?
Speaking of humiliating climb-downs, the United States still does not seem to have acquired Greenland or Canada. What is the next step in The Situation’s adventures in neo-imperialism? The administration is presumably not finished menacing America’s allies and neighbors. On the other hand, the stock market did not react well to the idea of a forcible takeover of a large block of ice—and that actually does have some inhibiting effect of behavior. Nor has Canada proven eager to be acquired and have its ten provinces condensed into one gigantic state. So what’s the next play if we assume that the neo-imperial project is not done and that the appetite increases with the unrequited attempts at eating?
Are we about to attack Iran—and why? In pursuit of what objectives?
The clock is still ticking on the longest 24-hours in world history: that one day the president promised it would take him to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Peace talks convened under American auspices have mysteriously not yielded a cease-fire yet. And the president himself has vacillated wildly on the subject of the Russia-Ukraine war: between rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska, dressing down Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, adopting Russian negotiating positions, and extorting mineral rights from Ukraine—on the one hand—and imposing new sanctions on Russia and freeing up Ukraine to engage in long-range strikes into Russian territory, on the other. What is the administration’s play as the peace talks continue to not result in a peace? Does it abandon Ukraine once and for all? Does it finally give up the president’s decade-long flirtation with the Russian dictator? Or does it continue the incoherent muddling through?
How much further do the president’s polls erode? So many of the conditions that make up The Situation actually depend—directly or indirectly—on public opinion. The Full-Scale Situation requires a certain degree of presidential popularity to drive it, after all. And a president who is terribly unpopular won’t be able to hold his congressional majority together to do things—or prevent Congress from taking steps to rein in the president. Similarly, the widespread expectation that the president is heading for a shellacking in the midterms involves a set of predictions and expectations about public opinion. It is a perception based on a rather minor, though clearly real, decline in the president’s public approval rating over time. Trump’s approval rating has drifted slowly downward, but it has also shown remarkable resilience. The president is, for example, still far more popular than President George W. Bush was at the end of his tenure. One imagines rather different scenarios if one thinks the southward drift will continue than if one hypothesizes that the president has hit bottom, and one imagines different scenarios still if one hypothesizes that his numbers might recover. How does public opinion over the next few months influence opposition protest strength, presidential flexibility in dealing with Congress and state governments, his own eccentricity, and other actors’ electoral considerations?
What is the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision today striking down tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act? Does the president attempt to reconstruct his signature economic initiative under other tariff regimes, none of which permits quite the freewheeling tariff-by-whim powers he claimed under IEEPA? Does the refunding of $200 billion in now-illegal tariffs blow a hole in the budget that cause either economic or political problems? Does the president begin to treat the Supreme Court with hostility similar to that with which he and his administration have treated lower courts?
The president is likely to lose a whole string of other high-profile litigations over the coming months—everything from his effort to overturn birthright citizenship by executive order to appeals in the criminal cases of high-profile political enemies. Does this coming—ongoing, really—string of court losses sharpen the sense of the courts as the enemy for the president? And if so, how does he react? What happens as the legal constraints increasingly restrain what he wants to do and as judges lose patience with his lawlessness?
How do you litigate thousands of cases challenging the legality of government action without anyone actually working at U.S. attorneys offices or at the Justice Department?
I pose these questions because they—along with a great many others I’m not thinking of right now—will condition The Situation over the next several months. Imagine the answers to these questions six months to a year from now, and you can imagine something about what America will look like then.
They are among the questions that will determine how The Situation continues tomorrow.
