Republicans plan to reverse progress made by the 1965 Voting Rights Act with racial based gerrymandering

Mapping Mississippi White published in The New York Review of Books by Jeffrey Toobin

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bennie Thompson was just seventeen years old—short of the voting age—so his parents reaped its benefits before he did. The family lived in Bolton, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred people twenty miles west of Jackson. Thompson’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an auto mechanic, had never been able to register and vote.

The VRA essentially put states with histories of racial discrimination into federal receivership to force them to comply with the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. As a first step, the federal government sent workers to the South to register Black citizens like Thompson’s parents. To assure further compliance, Section 5 of the act required those states to get approval from the Justice Department or a court before making any changes to their electoral systems. The federal registrars “created an opportunity to get registered without intimidation,” Thompson told me recently as we wandered through Bolton, where he still lives. “And the result was people like Bennie Thompson.”

Thompson discovered politics in the mid-Sixties as a student at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school and a civil rights hotbed in Jackson. He graduated in 1968 and, thanks to the new voters enfranchised by the VRA, won local office in Bolton the following year. (Prior to 1965, roughly 28,500 Black citizens in Mississippi—6.7 percent of those eligible—were registered to vote; within two years of the act’s passage, that number had soared to 264,000—59.8 percent.) Over the next two decades Thompson won a series of races for county-level positions in Mississippi and then, in 1993, a special election to Congress. He’s been reelected sixteen times. Thompson and Mike Espy, his predecessor in the seat, are the only Black people to be elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Thompson has been the chair and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but he came to broad national attention when then speaker Nancy Pelosi named him the chair of the special congressional committee charged with investigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a series of televised hearings in 2022, Thompson’s committee laid out how a violent insurrection nearly upended the transfer of presidential power. “I named a lot of our most intelligent and skilled members to that committee,” Pelosi told me.

And you know how Congress is. They all thought they should be the chairman. But after it was over, they all came to me and said that Bennie was so fair and showed so much integrity and skill that they agreed that he was the right one to be the chair.

Thompson has lived his entire political life in the shadow—and, for a long time, under the protection—of the VRA. Throughout that period, Congress and the courts have wrestled with a central question about its meaning, one with fundamental implications for Thompson’s political career. Does the VRA protect Black voters and officeholders only from intentional discrimination by government officials, or does it also guarantee Black candidates a fair chance of victory at the polls? To put the question in voting rights shorthand, is it an “intent” law or a “results” law?

Earlier this year the Supreme Court appeared to settle the question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 majority in effect established that the VRA prohibited only intentional discrimination. Republican-dominated states throughout the country, including Mississippi, took the decision as an invitation to gerrymander the seats of Black officeholders so they would have virtually no chance of winning reelection. Just two weeks after Callais was decided, Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, announced his intention to redraw the lines of Thompson’s district. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over,” Reeves posted on social media. “It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” The governor’s inflammatory language is revealing, especially because Thompson has had a scandal-free career; the only “terror” about Thompson, it seems, is that he’s Black and in Congress. While Reeves and his Republican allies in the state legislature ultimately decided against a new round of gerrymandering before the 2026 midterms, they are united in their determination to redraw not only Thompson’s district, but also those of Black officeholders in state and local positions across the state.

If the governor does end Thompson’s congressional career, it will mark more than the conclusion of a single politician’s time in office. It will signal the end of a grand experiment: a joint undertaking of the federal government and the courts to rectify enduring injustices in the American electoral system. More than half a century ago, the nearly absolute power wielded by white politicians in the South created the need for the VRA. Now, as a result of Callais and other Supreme Court decisions, the heirs to those politicians are reclaiming that power.

Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” John Lewis once said, recalling his early days as a civil rights leader. “Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”

In Mississippi in the 1960s, racist violence was a horrible constant. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the first field officer of the NAACP in the state, was shot dead in the driveway of his house in Jackson. The following year, when caravans of students and others came to register voters during the Freedom Summer, their buses were torched and the passengers beaten. Three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

This was the Mississippi where Bennie Thompson grew up. In the months after the VRA was passed, there were two cross burnings in Bolton. As he took me through its streets, Thompson showed me the United Methodist church he first went to as a child. “I’ve been in one physical church my whole life. Not just one religion, one physical church—which just happened to be right next door to the Head Start center that the Klan burned down,” he told me. “So that was kind of part of my introduction.”

The Supreme Court purported to end segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a decade later, Thompson was taught in what was still called the Bolton Colored School, which it was in fact if not in law. Most of Bolton’s white children eventually went to a private school called Central Hinds Academy just outside town. We took a drive to Central Hinds and happened on a football practice that featured, by my count, about two dozen white kids and one Black player. Thompson smiled and gestured at the lone figure: “He’s an athlete.”

A short distance from Bolton’s main drag, which has just a handful of storefronts, Thompson slowed down in front of a modest swimming pool. When he became mayor of Bolton in 1973, he learned that the town had donated $2,500 to the local nonprofit that had built the pool a few years earlier and then decreed that it was whites only. “My position was, the public money was donated, therefore, it’s a public pool,” he told me. “I closed the pool and said unless you make it a public pool, you can’t open.” In response, the nonprofit simply refunded the town’s $2,500: “They kept it all white.” (The pool is now in private hands.)

Meanwhile, the white politicians in charge of the Mississippi state government fought the VRA in every way they could. The local authorities could no longer stop Black citizens from registering, but the state had many other tools to preserve white rule. In 1966 the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts so that Black voters in the Mississippi Delta region were split among three districts and were thus powerless to elect one of their own. (Then as now, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state: about 40 percent then and about 37 percent now.) The state also rewrote the rules in many white-majority cities and towns so that officials were elected at-large rather than by neighborhood, which might have given Black candidates a chance. 

In eleven communities, Mississippi changed school superintendent positions from elected to appointed to prevent Black candidates from running and winning.

Some of those changes were challenged by the federal government. The early years of the VRA, when Thompson came of age, unfolded in a national political environment very different from today’s. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. Even though Richard Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy,” playing to white racism in the South to win the presidency in 1968, he signed a reauthorization of the VRA in 1970; Gerald Ford did the same in 1975. During the administrations of these Republican presidents, the Justice Department used its authority under Section 5 of the VRA to veto some of the attempts by Mississippi and other states to thwart the intent of the law.

Still, progress for Black Mississippians often came slowly, including for Thompson. When the VRA was passed, Black residents were in the majority in two of the five supervisors’ districts in Hinds County, which includes Jackson. But county officials changed the election for supervisors to an at-large system. Black voters sued, and eventually, in 1977, the full Fifth Circuit declared that Hinds County violated the VRA. As Frank R. Parker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in his book Black Votes Count (1990),

The board of supervisors was forced to adopt a new plan that contained two districts that were over 65 percent black. In the 1979 county elections—after eight years of litigation—two black county supervisors, Bennie G. Thompson and George Smith, were elected as the first black county supervisors in Hinds County since Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court offered an initial answer in City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). According to the Court, it was not enough if Black voters failed to elect one of their own; they had to prove that the white majority intended to violate their voting rights. Civil rights supporters denounced the Mobile decision, asserting that in the modern era, white legislators knew better than to display racially discriminatory intent. Proving again the bipartisan support for voting rights at the time, Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1982 to pass a twenty-five-year extension of the VRA that was revised to effectively overturn the Mobile decision. Conservative senators like Orrin Hatch and Robert Dole voted for the extension, and Ronald Reagan signed it into law. It established a “results” test: plaintiffs needed to show only that a state’s action produced discriminatory outcomes in order to win their cases.

Again, Thompson owed the next step in his career to the VRA. After the 1982 changes to the act, Black plaintiffs challenged the 1966 gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. Now they had to prove only that the creation of the districts led to discriminatory results, which they did. The courts compelled the state at last to establish a majority-Black congressional district, and Mike Espy won the seat in 1986. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of agriculture. In the special election to fill the vacancy that year, Thompson won.

By this point, even though the makeup of the Supreme Court was almost the same, the justices had changed course on voting rights. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), they ratified—and strengthened—the results test established in the revision of the VRA by holding that states had to acknowledge when they had a history of “racially polarized voting.” In establishing district lines, they had to consider “whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If white residents did vote that way, the states had to include enough Black voters to give a Black candidate a chance to win election. In other words, the Court recognized what Thompson told me about voters in Mississippi, and it thus ensured that districts like his would remain intact.

It’s now clear that the crucial event in the eventual demise of the VRA was President George W. Bush’s appointment in 2005, of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. In the early 1980s, after Roberts had completed his clerkship with then associate justice William H. Rehnquist, he took a number of junior positions in President Reagan’s White House and Justice Department. There, in a series of memos, Roberts expressed his opposition to what became the 1982, reauthorization of the VRA. In strong language for a young staffer, Roberts endorsed the Court’s decision in the Mobile case and voiced his passionate belief that the law should protect Black voters only from intentional discrimination, not from unfair results. For example, in a January 26, 1982, memo to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that adding a results test to the law would lead to a “quota system in electoral politics.”

Roberts lost that battle, but his appointment to the Supreme Court put him in a position to win the war, especially once he was joined by other conservative justices. To Roberts and the other conservatives, the VRA was another way the government sought to privilege Black citizens over others, much like affirmative action, which they also eventually outlawed. Combining a narrow reading of the rights of Black voters under the VRA with an expansive understanding of the rights of whites under the Constitution, the conservatives began chipping away at the act.

The first great blow came in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, in which Roberts’s opinion for the Court effectively overruled Sections 4 and 5. In both the original version of the VRA and in every subsequent reauthorization, Congress held investigatory hearings and, based on the results, established a formula for determining which states and localities had histories of discrimination and thus were subject to the act’s provisions. The theme of Roberts’s opinion, however, was that the nation had changed. He wrote that after the passage of the VRA, “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” The statutory formula did not, in his view, take these changes sufficiently into account, even though Congress had looked at the same facts and concluded otherwise. According to Roberts, the law violated “the tradition of equal sovereignty” among the states and was thus unconstitutional. Unless Congress changed the formula (which it was unlikely to do and never has), there would be no more jurisdictions subject to Section 5, which was now a dead letter.

Immediately after the Shelby County decision, several states formerly covered by Section 5, now freed from Justice Department oversight, changed their election laws to make it harder for Black people (and others) to vote. On the very day that the decision was announced, the Texas legislature announced that it would tighten the photo ID requirements for voting, which a court had earlier said burdened minorities. Mississippi and Alabama passed similar laws. North Carolina enacted a series of voter restriction measures, including a requirement of a government-issued ID, and a limitation on early voting. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, none of these changes had to be submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance. The southern states immediately showed that they had changed less than Roberts claimed they had.

In theory, Shelby County left open the kind of VRA lawsuits that made Thompson’s career possible. Under Section 2 of the law, individual plaintiffs, not just the federal government, could sue localities for violating the rights of Black voters. It was private Section 2 lawsuits during the Sixties and Seventies that forced Mississippi to reverse the gerrymandering that had ruled out Black candidates like Thompson for the Hinds County seats and his congressional district. But in the past few years the Supreme Court has shut down Section 2 lawsuits, too. And crucially the Court in 2019 allowed state legislatures to design districts that gave an advantage to a ruling party, holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” beyond the remit of federal courts. The decision gave Republican map drawers in the South the perfect way to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. They could eliminate the seats of Black officeholders on the grounds that they were targeting only Democrats.

The coup de grâce came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s, the law of the land.

Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court said that its purpose was to “update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of §2 and constitutional principles,” but the effect of the ruling was to overrule Gingles and invalidate the results test entirely. Citing Rucho, Alito said that henceforth “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” But the truth was that he was inviting Republican state legislators to dress their racial gerrymandering in political garb, with likely fatal political consequences for Black officeholders like Thompson. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent, Callais was the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

In taking up the Supreme Court’s invitation in Callais, Governor Reeves and the Republican-dominated state legislature in Mississippi are proceeding in an orderly fashion. State legislative elections take place there in 2027, and the Republicans are moving first to gerrymander those seats to the advantage of Republican, and thus mostly white, candidates. According to an analysis of prospective maps by Fair Fight Action/Black Voters Matter, a liberal advocacy group, an aggressive post-Callais map by Republicans could eliminate twenty-nine—nearly half—of Mississippi’s Black-majority legislative districts. When that task is complete, Reeves and his colleagues will turn to congressional maps and the fate of Thompson’s district in 2028. Other longtime African American members of Congress, including Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, James Clyburn in South Carolina, and Sanford Bishop in Georgia, are similarly at risk of losing their seats in 2028. In all, in the next two years, the Congressional Black Caucus, which began the current Congress with sixty-two members, could lose as many as nineteen because of the kind of redistricting now permitted by the Supreme Court.

In addition to his security responsibilities in Congress, Thompson also serves as a custodian of institutional memory of the civil rights movement. For the past twenty-seven years, he has hosted an annual Mississippi Policy Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, at which he introduces colleagues of all races and backgrounds to a part of the world they may not know and a history they may not remember. “I take folks and show them what cotton looks like growing in the field,” he told me. “I mean, some folks think cotton comes from Walmart.” The conference takes place in Tunica, which Robert Kennedy toured in 1967, when it was known as perhaps the poorest city in America. (The town’s fortunes have improved since the opening of a nearby casino.)

“I had never been to Mississippi before Bennie invited me to the conference,” Joe Neguse, a four-term congressman from Colorado, told me. Neguse, who is forty-two, belongs to a generation of Black politicians whose experiences differ greatly from Thompson’s. “It was one thing to read about what happened in Mississippi,” he said, “but it was another to go there and learn from Bennie and others who had to grapple with such obstacles.”

For now Thompson will campaign as usual in his so-far-unchanged district. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, too, pointing out to me that breaking up his district, which is roughly 64 percent Black, might involve some peril for the Republicans: “The $64,000 question for the Republican leadership in this state is, what are you going to do with the Black people? You gonna push them in the Mississippi River?”

To change Thompson’s district, the mapmakers would have to move its Black voters into the three other districts, which are all currently represented by white Republicans. That might give Democrats chances to win those seats: “So ultimately, you could create two purple districts and end up with two Democrats rather than one.” Republicans might not want to take that chance and thus might leave Thompson’s district more or less intact. (There’s also a chance that Thompson might not run again in 2028.)

Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try. The tools to fight back are very different today from what they were in the first decades after the passage of the VRA. Even if the Justice Department were inclined to protect the gains of Black voters and officeholders (which it clearly is not under the Trump administration), the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Section 5 has made such an effort impossible. And the Court itself, which was at least sometimes an ally of the VRA, has turned into an implacable foe. As a result, there will soon be fewer Black elected officials, perhaps a lot fewer, than there have been in the recent past. Representative democracy will look, and be, less representative, which is the problem that gave rise to the VRA.

“The issue is not whether Bennie Thompson represents this district or not,” Thompson said. “It’s whether or not the people who live in this district have a shot at representing and electing the candidates of their choice.”

Whenever the subject of race and voting in Mississippi came up, Thompson always offered the same straightforward explanation: “If you look at the historical voting patterns, especially in the South, Black people vote for white and Black candidates, but for the most part, white voters still vote for white candidates.” To Thompson, enforcement of the VRA must take those facts into consideration or the law would have no meaning at all. If states are allowed to gerrymander legislative districts so that Black candidates have no chance of winning—regardless of what could be proved about the legislators’ racial intentions—then white domination of the political process would continue as before 1965. Still, in the early versions of the VRA, the text was ambiguous about whether it was an “intent” or a “results” law.

Learning about the evils of slavery in America from the inside outl- two book reviews in one essay

The Slave's Power published in The New York Review of Books reviews by Drew Gillpin Faust

Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive left by those who defended and benefited from human bondage.

Black teamsters guiding a group of fugitives to safety in northern Virginia, 1862 (Library of Congress)

Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans
by Susan Eva O’Donovan
Penguin Press, 369 pp., $35.00

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
by Melvin Patrick Ely
Henry Holt, 352 pp., $31.99

For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery. 

Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors❓ In many ways it is a surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight and magnolias” South of Gone with the Wind and most earlier studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as well as a portrait of the system that bound them together.

It seems even odder to be having this debate now, when attacks on history by the right demand that such matters as chattel slavery be erased altogether or reconfigured to ensure an adequately “patriotic” account of the national past. Last year, several weeks after President Donald Trump instructed the Smithsonian Institution that it would have to adjust anything his administration took issue with regarding “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals,” he complained that the Smithsonian’s museums focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” The National Park Service is revising interpretations at its sites to offer an upbeat rendering of human bondage, if slavery is mentioned at all. In January, the Park Service workers took crowbars to signage memorializing the nine enslaved people who worked in George Washington’s presidential house in Philadelphia.

We have never needed more to believe in—and defend—the possibility of a rigorous, fact-based telling of slavery’s history. Our nation’s future requires a clear-eyed understanding of how its aspirations for freedom and democracy coexisted with an institution defined by violence and injustice. We cannot overcome our past if we fail to document and confront it, and so we must strive to make the realities of American slavery ever more visible and undeniable.

But can we adequately document an institution whose records were overwhelmingly produced by those who built and benefited from it? In her presidential address to the American Historical Association in January 2025, Thavolia Glymph, a professor of history at Duke, insisted that this is not just a possibility but a necessity. She challenged those who assail what historians have come to call the “archive” of slavery—the manuscripts and books left by our forebears—as too compromised to be useful. Critics have argued that this record, the creation of enslavers and white supremacists, reflects the interests of the empowered and silences the enslaved, who were mostly prohibited from reading and writing and thus left unable to tell their side of the story.

Glymph readily admitted that this is the “damaged space that we historians have to work with.” Yet even with its biases she said she finds it “boisterous” and “noisy,” full of unruly voices of the subjugated, awaiting the historian’s discerning eye. Every encounter with power, she insisted, “also captures the agitation of the enslaved that led to the encounter.” In their effort to control the archive, enslavers did “a pretty bad job; indeed, they failed miserably.” Glymph’s own deeply researched work on enslaved and formerly enslaved women is testimony to her argument.
“Millions of paper tracings,” she said, “are there in which enslaved people claim for themselves more than a trace in history.”

Two recent books represent the remarkable discoveries that this archive of slavery can yield. Both recognize the distortions inherent in a record kept by those who defended human bondage and believed that Black people are inferior. Yet both employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the nineteenth-century materials available to them. And each is clearly caught up in the spirit of the hunt and the joy of searching for hidden treasures that inspire the best historical researchers.

A professor at the University of Memphis, Susan Eva O’Donovan has immersed herself in what she embraces as “slavery’s vast archive,” exploring “correspondence, ledgers, diaries, logs, receipts, reports, contracts, complaints, bills, court cases, police blotters, and ship manifests” in order to reconstruct the experience of human bondage. At the outset of her career, more than thirty years ago, O’Donovan served as an assistant editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, a pathbreaking initiative established in 1976 to identify materials relevant to the coming of freedom, chiefly in the voluminous holdings of the National Archives. No one had systematically looked for such documents before or asked the questions about the African American past that by the 1970s had come to be seen as essential. The FSSP has in the years since published six doorstop volumes of evidence about slavery and emancipation. 

O’Donovan is a coeditor of two (and Glymph coeditor of two others). Few historians are more familiar with the records of American slavery and the opportunities for writing its history.

Her purpose in Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans is to demonstrate that even before emancipation the enslaved had carved out spaces of independence from their enslavers. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Black southerners were not simply victims of oppression but also a people in motion—literally across land and water and figuratively toward freedom, even when an end to slavery seemed all but unimaginable. Masters’ control was never absolute, and slaves exploited these limitations, readying themselves to take advantage of their eventual legal emancipation. Theirs was, she insists, the work of politics, an assertion of power not at a ballot box but through the events and arrangements of everyday life. O’Donovan’s arguments build on earlier work by a number of other scholars who identified a Black politics that emerged even under slavery, perhaps most notably Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2004. But the richness of her examples and her use of the lens of motion and travel succeed in deepening our understanding.

The balance of oppression and resistance in slavery is complex, O’Donovan stresses. To overemphasize the agency of the enslaved would be to “ignore the violent character of American slavery, an institution forged to steal the labor of millions for white people’s gain.” But to minimize the influence of slaves within the system of constraints imposed on them would be yet another subjugation. The enslaved were, to borrow the parlance of the civil rights movement, “making a way out of no way.”

O’Donovan centers her analysis on examples of slaves moving beyond their places of bondage in the regular course of doing their owners’ business. The tension between freedom and total control, she shows, lies at the very heart of what southerners called “the peculiar institution.” Using unfree workers optimally and efficiently often required granting them some modicum of autonomy, some reprieve from constant scrutiny, some access to the world beyond the master’s direct purview. “To leash their laborers too tightly,” she writes, “would be to strangle themselves and their great golden goose.” Enslaved men worked as crews and as skilled pilots and stewards on steamboats, and as loggers and “wooders” providing fuel along inland waterways. On land, enslaved teamsters hauled goods—for example, cotton to market—similarly escaping the “suffocating surveillance” of the plantation. Their travels put them in contact with people from other parts of the nation and beyond, often in situations in which sharp social and racial distinctions were difficult to uphold and new ideas, including those that might challenge slavery, difficult to suppress. As the Missouri Supreme Court wrote in an 1835 case involving an enslaved drayman, “He acts as a freeman all the day.”

The movement of enslaved women tended to have a different character. Many traveled as domestic servants for the convenience of their mistresses, visiting spas like Saratoga Springs in New York or cities like Philadelphia or even London where slavery did not exist. O’Donovan ingeniously uses a federal record of all enslaved people who left or entered United States’ seaports, a register kept after 1808 to monitor possible violations of the law banning the international slave trade. She finds that such travelers were overwhelmingly female—in most cases, she argues, the attendants of elite southerners visiting abroad or embarking on the grand tour. Their journeys introduced them to new worlds. On a transatlantic steamship voyage, Frederick Douglass remarked that “all color distinctions were flung to the winds.” Enslaved workers who had witnessed free societies and seen the place of free African Americans within them no longer understood their own situation as unalterable. Travel helped produce a contagion of liberty.

Over the course of the antebellum era, boom and bust could accelerate or diminish mobility. In the 1820s and 1830s, expansion into the cotton kingdom of the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states—relocated hundreds of thousands of Black southerners who were transported or sold to cultivate rich virgin soils. In the 1850s, high cotton prices drove productivity, which in turn required more marketing and hauling, more teamsters and enslaved workers interacting with towns and cities beyond their plantations.

Moments of genuine activism emerged out of growing political awareness among the enslaved as sectional hostilities and attacks on slavery intensified. Anxious slaveholders worried about the “great meetings” of their unfree laborers that began during John C. Frémont’s Free Soil campaign for the presidency in 1856. O’Donovan describes protests that erupted along a canal in Rockbridge, Virginia, and along a railroad under construction in Alabama, as well as a rebellion plotted in a plantation district near Memphis. In South Carolina, a committee of slaves sent a delegation to the governor to petition for “redress of certain grievances.” As one Black southerner later recalled, in the years after the 1856 election “a great anger arose among the colored people,” and they “began to study how they would get free.”

When Union armies advanced into the South in 1861, enslaved people knew what was at stake. Some hundreds of thousands fled to Union lines because, O’Donovan argues, they had been “laying the foundations for liberation for decades.” They were ready, and they understood, in the words of an 1865 petition of the Black residents of Nashville, “the burdens of citizenship” as well as its promises. As a gathering of freedpeople declared to Union general Joseph Fullerton in July 1865, “We is come to the law now.”

In A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, Melvin Patrick Ely, a professor at William and Mary, makes clear that Black southerners had in fact been touched by the law throughout the antebellum period. Unlike O’Donovan’s sweeping study, Ely’s book is sharply focused, delving into six criminal cases in one Virginia community—the notorious Prince Edward County, which achieved an enduring place in history by closing its public schools from 1959 until 1964 rather than integrating them after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Yet like O’Donovan, Ely relishes the relentless quest for sources, and his excitement is evident in discoveries like the “sheaf of bluish-brown tissue-thin pages” recording the testimony at an 1854 rape trial or the rare court minute book he found in a little-used archival warehouse near the Richmond airport. He offers the reader a you-are-there approach both to his own work as a scholar and to the proceedings of a nineteenth-century courtroom.

Ely seeks to particularize the history of slavery, to embed it in the stories of individual men and women, white and Black, whose testimony, “not verbatim but very detailed,” was recorded by court clerks. Such sources have often been dismissed as partial and unreliable evidence because of laws that prohibited Black people from testifying against white defendants in southern states. But Ely shows us how much was said in spite of this prohibition, citing examples of white people on the stand relating stories they had heard from African Americans—a confounding judicial circumstance in which the admission of hearsay in some measure compensated for the limits on Black testimony. And Black people, both free and enslaved, who were not themselves on trial were frequent witnesses (if the defendant was not white) and were recorded speaking at length.

Ely, too, emphasizes the complexity of slavery as a system and as a web of human relationships. In Prince Edward County, three quarters of white households owned slaves, but in small numbers, not in large plantation-scale holdings. It was, Ely writes, “a little republic of middle-level slaveholding men” that thrust people together across class and race and condition—even in court. The “terrible intimacy” of his title refers to the closeness of Black and white people in nearly every aspect of daily life, including sexual ties across the color line and blurred family links that defied notions of racial purity. But this was, as he describes it, a “deformed” intimacy produced by a society “that exploited and abused” Black people.

To enable his readers to engage directly with the past themselves, Ely organizes his book around the reports of witness testimony for the six cases he uses to capture his slice of nineteenth-century southern life. His earlier works, he explains, simply presented his interpretation of his sources from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; he effectively asked the reader to “trust me.” But this time “I want you to walk through these stories with me—to see them unfold as they did in the community and then in the courtroom.” He adopts a familiar, conversational tone, assessing what he sees, acknowledging where he finds the record “biased and riddled with blind spots,” and using his extensive knowledge of the place and the period to help make sense of materials that might otherwise seem puzzling. Each trial unfolds step by step, often revealing surprising twists that underscore the contradictory forces of humanity and inhumanity in the everyday life of a slave society.

An enslaved man named George is acquitted of rape in an 1854 trial in which his white accuser’s lower-class status and dubious reputation sway the jury to credit the supportive testimony of white witnesses. Mary Tatum was regarded by her neighbors with contempt; George seemed always appropriately “straight-forward humble & obedient.” As one elderly white woman explained, “I thought the negro ought not to be hung for nothing.” 

In a murder trial in 1861, after the outbreak of the Civil War, witnesses tell a sickening tale of cruelty inflicted on William, a man accused of killing his enslaver. The prisoner is not executed but instead convicted of second-degree murder, with his sentence commuted by the governor to life at labor on public works. Yet in the course of testimony it becomes evident that many white members of the community had long known of this owner’s “very barbarous” behavior—extracting teeth as punishment, beating William so frequently that his back became a giant scab. Yet they did nothing until their neighbor was dead and William on trial.

The southern system of slavery hid under the veneer of law, but Ely illustrates the elusiveness of genuine justice or mercy within its structures of repression. Human beings both Black and white nevertheless pushed the limits of control, motivated by a wide range of factors—pure self-interest in the case of enslavers who did not want to lose their valuable slave property to the gallows, human sympathy from individuals connected to one another even across racial lines, as well as Black Virginians’ anticipation that white people might somehow, someday be called to account as Christians and Americans.

O’Donovan notes that more than two hundred Black men and women who had been taken outside the South for a period of time by their enslavers sued for freedom in the same court that heard the famous case of Dred Scott, all arguing that once they had set foot on free soil they were legally free. Ely offers no example of such direct use of the law by African Americans in Prince Edward County. But even as the enslaved people who came into that Virginia courtroom were subjected to the display of white supremacy, they also confronted some of its weaknesses, likely emboldening them to seize their freedom when the moment arrived. Rife with the contradictions inherent in defining human beings as chattel property, slavery contained the germs of its own destruction, and both authors let us understand how those seeds might have taken root.

Did William, sentenced in 1861, labor on the public works for life? Or did he run to Union lines when Northern troops advanced and provided an opportunity? Even Ely’s prodigious research gives us no answer to these questions. The archive of slavery cannot tell us all we would like to know. But it can tell us a great deal, and it can continue to challenge us to reckon with a national past that represents human failures as well as human triumphs. We today are the products of all of those. A crowbar cannot change that.

Donald Trump incarcerating innocent migrants in filthy detention camps. In my opinion, call them concentration camps.

"The New Ellis Island" is a July 2026, review essay by journalist Julia Preston for The New York Review of Books. It examines the book El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa, using the history of El Paso, Texas, to explore national immigration policies. 

Preston uses Ulloa’s book to explain how El Paso, Texas, has become a modern-day equivalent to historic Ellis Island. 

Historically, Ellis Island in New York Harbor processed over 12 million European immigrants who sought a new start in America. Today, El Paso serves as a major gateway and "bellwether" for US immigration policy, where the country's complicated history of welcoming and rejecting migrants is embroiled in American history.

In this blogspot, I want to highlight the final page of Preston's essay in her book review, because she describes the here and now of this ongoing challenging story.

Preston describes Ulloa’s determination to elevate El Paso was spurred by a horrific event. As a reporter for The Boston Globe, she returned to El Paso to cover the aftermath of a mass shooting by Patrick Crusius, a young white supremacist armed with an AK-47-style rifle and one thousand rounds of ammunition, at a local Walmart on August 3, 2019. He killed twenty-three people, among them both the mother and the father of an infant. Minutes before the attack, Crusius had posted a manifesto online in which he decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and said, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement.” 

At the time, Donald Trump was routinely vilifying Mexicans as criminal predators stampeding over the border. Crusius amplified to an extreme the fear of Mexicans that had long permeated the Southwest and was spreading, fanned by Trump’s rhetoric, across the country.

El Paso closes with the advent of Trump 2.0, as the he revives the specter of an alien invasion to justify an evilmass deportation blitz. Yet the outcomes for Ulloa’s families are mostly positive, proving her point about borderland social mobility. Raúl Reyes, the grandson of Miguel Martinez, is a historian in El Paso dedicated to recovering the past of his and many other Texas families. The judge who arraigned the Walmart shooter in an El Paso courtroom was a descendant of the Chews. Blanca and Susan Rubio, the daughters of Sabino, were elected to seats in the California state legislature.

“We are those bad Mexicans that he talks about,” Blanca Rubio said, referring to Trump, in a newspaper interview not long after Susan was sworn in. “We were undocumented, and then we fought hard, we got an education, and now we’re sitting here.”

In his State of the Union address this February, President Trump revived the tropes of Manifest Destiny to express his view of the nation’s origins. Americans, he said, had “carved pass through an unforgiving wilderness, settled a boundless frontier, and tamed the beautiful but very, very dangerous wild west. From empty marshes and wide-open plains, we raised up the world’s greatest cities.” Ulloa comprehensively refutes this version of events. In the Texas borderlands, the marshes were never empty nor were the plains wide open. The story Ulloa tells also makes clear that the unfettered nativism of Trump’s second term is not new in American history—not the poisonous invective depicting Venezuelans and other immigrants as gangsters and thieves, not the cruel removals of people who provide essential labor in American workplaces, not the roundups that ensnare noncitizens and citizens alike.

The border at El Paso is quieter now than it has been in decades, as Trump has made good on at least one of his campaign promises, to impose control by blocking illegal crossings and eliminating access to asylum along the boundary line. By the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the Mexican border had plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1970, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Yet, consistent with Ulloa’s argument, El Paso is still an epicenter of the United States’ system of social engineering through immigration. Despite the calm at the border, the city has not been spared Trump’s deportation campaign. The Catholic ✝️bishop of El Paso, Mark J. Seitz, in a pastoral message shared in parishes throughout the diocese on March 15, described its impacts. “Neighbors are being snatched as they walk out of immigration court proceedings downtown,” the bishop reported.

Workers are being taken from construction sites across the city…. Young women are languishing in mental torture for months in private detention centers, even when, coerced by the conditions of their imprisonment, they beg to be deported…. So many people are once again being made to feel like they are less than American.

In the first half of 2025, El Paso was second in the country in the number of deportation arrests of immigrants after hearings at the city’s immigration courts, surpassed only by arrests at the courts in New York City, according to a study by the mathematician Joseph Gunther.

El Paso is also a major juncture in the United States’ punitive immigration infrastructure. Not far from downtown sits Camp East Montana, an enormous tent city constructed in 2025 in a bleak patch on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US Army base that makes recurring appearances in Ulloa’s account. The camp is the country’s largest immigration detention center, part of an archipelago that the Department of Homeland Security is assembling nationwide to hold as many as 100,000 immigrants. People who were arrested as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis have been sent to Camp East Montana. Under Trump’s rules, immigrants have been denied bond and forced to wait out slow-moving immigration court proceedings in detention, with the evident intent of causing them to despair and leave the United States on their own. To date more than four hundred federal judges and three appeals courts have ruled this policy unlawful and ordered immigrants released; two appeals courts have backed the policy, allowing DHS to continue.

Despite receiving $45 billion for detention in Trump’s big 2025 tax and spending bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has demonstrated that it is overwhelmed by the demands of jailing so many people. Almost as soon as it opened, Camp East Montana devolved into a hellhole with inedible food, eating areas flooded with sewage, a lack of basic hygiene, and dangerously inadequate medical care that led to outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis, according to a report in December by the American Civil Liberties Union that was based on interviews with forty-five detainees. The death on January 3 of a Cuban detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. It was the result of a “spontaneous use of force” by guards, ICE admitted in an official incident report. The report states that the guards were trying to prevent Lunas Campos “from harming himself.” But a witness interviewed by the El Paso Times said he heard the man pleading for asthma medication. Lunas Campos is one of three detainees who have died in the camp since December. According to a report published on June 9 by the US Government Accountability Office, another detainee died in January by suicide after being left alone and unattended in a windowless holding room. The GAO report found that some of the teeming dormitories at the camp were cleaned only once a week. No treatment plans were in place for detainees with HIV or diabetes. The conditions posed “serious risks to the safety and security” of detained people and staff, the report found. In March ICE fired the contractor running the facility, but then hired another one instead of closing the camp down.

What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal year. Acting largely on his executive edicts, agents have extended into the country’s interior the race-based stops, strong-arm arrests, disregard for due process, and fast-track removals that have long been the regular practice of the Border Patrol in remote reaches along the line. A Border Patrol chief from California, Gregory Bovino, led Operation Metro Surge, the occupation by more than three thousand agents of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, applying what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, his strategy of “total immigration domination.” After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were US citizens, Trump sensed that the show of force had gone too far. 

Trump replaced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator who is equally hard-line but said in his confirmation hearing that DHS would be less conspicuous: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” Bovino retired. But under the command of the “border czar,” Tom Homan, agents are still hunting down immigrants, regardless of whether they have criminal records, in homes, schools, grocery store parking lots, and workplaces, if less noisily. On June 5 the Republican-led Congress voted to provide another 💲70 billion to ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other DHS offices for enforcement, detention, and deportation. (Maine Writer, this appropriation was approved by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins in exchange for passing more tax cuts for the rich and multimillionaires like herself.)

Also new is the widespread resistance to Trump’s crackdown. In Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and many other places where ICE arrived—including El Paso—citizens have rallied with whistles and horns to alert immigrants of danger, tracked agents’ movements with phone cameras in hand, provided food for families too scared to leave their homes, and even offered places for them to hide. When ICE has tried to open new detention centers, towns have been fighting back with lawsuits, city council resolutions, environmental restrictions, petition drives, and street protests. Places as distant as Chester, New York, and Oklahoma City have succeeded in stopping ICE’s projects. As with the social blend of El Paso, many immigrant families now include a mix of legal status, with undocumented parents, US-born children (who are by definition citizens), and relatives with other forms of status. Neighbors can see that the kids attend local schools and the parents work in the community. More Americans have become witnesses to the damage left behind when parents are separated from their children, including many who are US citizens, and deported. 

Polls re[prt how Trump’s assault is losing public support. In a survey in March by the Public Religion Research Institute only 35 percent of Americans rated Trump’s handling of immigration favorably, down from 48 percent in March 2025; 48 percent held very unfavorable views. If Ulloa’s history is any guide, it may be that the country is reaching the nadir (aka, "lowest point") of one of its perennial immigration cycles.

Americn media must not normalize Donald Trump and maga Fascist behavior! Use real words to describe the actual crimes!

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/26/the-crime-of-witness-fintan-otoole/

The Crime of Witness Fintan O’Toole

Published in The New York Review of Books:

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence. February 26, 2026 issue
This article was originally published online January 29, 2026, in slightly modified form. —The Editors

Renee Good and Alex Pretti murdered by ICE in Minneapolis

Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.

It is striking that the capital offense for which both Mr. Pretti and Ms, Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness.  Ms. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. 

Habit, as Samuel Beckett said, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.

First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis,❗ the (illegal) 💢 Trump regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied.

I know, by the way, that this is quite possible. For thirty years, in parts of my native island of Ireland, troops with machine guns crouching in shop doorways or skulking in the back gardens of ordinary houses were so taken for granted that one saw them, if at all, out of the corner of one’s eye. What is always there becomes barely there at all.

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax.

The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Ms. Renee Good on January 7, 2026, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But, in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Ms. Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

This does not mean that Pretti’s killing was specifically ordered. But the template for it was certainly prepared in advance. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Here it is a case of justification first, execution afterwards. The license to kill Pretti was issued when Good was redefined as a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an officer.

Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.

The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Ms. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped  into the plural, making Mr. Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences.

It does not matter that this hyped-up story is harder to make credible than the usual kind of official lying that characterizes such killings merely as unfortunate accidents whose true cause is impossible to determine. Getting people to accept a vaguely credible account is a lesser manifestation of absolute power than getting them to accept—or even better, to just shrug their shoulders at—a wildly incredible one.

There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Mr. Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.

Thus, even while The New York Times did excellent work in analyzing the video footage of Mr. Pretti’s execution, it initially resorted to the bland conclusion that “videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting.” Appear? As the paper implicitly acknowledged later, the truth is that “videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.” It is good that the instinctive resort to fuzzy circumlocution was eventually overcome, but surely, once the paper’s analysis showed definitively that the administration was brazenly lying about an official murder, that ought to have been the starkest of headlines.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal declared that although he did not deserve to be shot dead, “Mr. Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents.” His error was that he “attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents.” It is clear from the rest of the article that the Journal believes the Trump administration to be lying about its unjustified killing of an American citizen, but the import of this otherwise astounding truth is diluted by the suggestion that he was, after all, a fool. In an authoritarian state, who but a fool would try to help a woman who has been pepper-sprayed by the great leader’s shock troops?

The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Mr. Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.

The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Mr. Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Mr. Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books. .

Donald Trump and maga Republicans ignore illegal murder of Venezuelans in open seas without evidence

Getting Away with Murder David Cole
Trump has now ordered the killing of at least seventeen people on the high seas—with no accountability.

Echo essay by David Cole published in The New York Review of Books:  During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more.

Between September 2, and September 19, the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats traveling in international waters, reportedly killing seventeen civilians in cold blood. Ordinarily when US armed forces kill civilians, the president does not brag about it, yet Trump is apparently so proud of the executions that he posted video footage of them on Truth Social. And while ordinarily the killing of any civilian prompts investigations and apologies, in this instance the administration has promised only that there are more to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, “please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.”

There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The “war on drugs” is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the “enemy.” The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.

Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists” and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a “foreign terrorist organization.” But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.

The boats did not pose any conceivable threat to the United States requiring lethal force. They were found on the high seas, reportedly coming from Venezuela. The first boat, according to The New York Times, had turned around before it was bombed, and the military reportedly continued to bomb it even after it had been disabled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that they could have interdicted the vessel, but said that instead they bombed it to send a message: “This president is not a talker; he’s a doer—he’s going to do it.”

Trump has maintained that drug cartels kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, presumably through overdoses, and that other nations are not doing enough to stop the trade. The result, he insisted in a letter to Congress after the first strike, is that “we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.” But the fact that drugs are a scourge in the US in no way gives the president the authority to start killing drug dealers—here, abroad, or at sea. And it is farcical to cite “self-defense” to justify bombing these ships to smithereens, without even a shred of evidence that they threatened to attack us.

In the absence of any conceivable military justification for these acts, it is difficult to view them as anything but premeditated murder, pure and simple. Federal law makes it a crime to kill a human being “with malice aforethought” on the high seas, and to conspire to do so. As my Georgetown Law colleague Marty Lederman, a former Justice Department official in the Office of Legal Counsel, has explained in an essay on the website Just Security, not only is it “questionable whether the President had any affirmative legal authority to order” the attack, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that, “absent further facts that haven’t yet been disclosed, the strike would appear to have implicated the federal felony murder statutes.”

Maybe “most alarming,” in Lederman’s estimation, is how dramatically these killings break from the Defense Department’s stated commitment, required by international law, not to target civilians, even in wartime. Indeed, Trump’s actions are so indefensible that even John Yoo, who as a Justice Department official authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture against suspected al-Qaeda detainees, and who takes about as robust a view of executive authority over national security as anyone, has seriously questioned the legal basis for the strikes, insisting that it is dangerous to blur the line between law enforcement and war.

But the White House couldn’t care less. This was made crystal clear when Vice President J.D. Vance, ever the good learner at the foot of his boss, posted on X that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” When Brian Krassenstein, a critic of the Trump administration, replied that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” the vice-president of the United States responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

This is not normal. Prior presidents have invoked war authorities on dubious grounds to justify the use of lethal force and other unlawful measures, as when Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada on the pretense of protecting Americans in medical school there, or when George W. Bush asserted the authority to disappear suspected al-Qaeda terrorists into secret CIA “black sites” and torture them, or when Barack Obama resorted to drones to assassinate suspected members of al-Qaeda or ISIS. Each questionable exercise of executive authority eases the way for further expansions. But never before has a US president asserted the authority to order the cold-blooded execution of civilians outside any even arguable military conflict. And never before has a US president then turned around and boasted about his own crimes to the public at large. If the president can order the summary killing of drug dealers on the high seas, why not elsewhere—say, Mexico, or Chicago?

Now a draft bill is reportedly circulating in Congress and the White House that would expressly authorize Trump to execute more “narcoterrorists,” a veritable license to kill civilians without trial. The fact that the White House and its allies are considering such a bill only underscores the absence of existing authority for the strikes. Such a blank check, moreover, would not change the fact that targeting civilians who are not directly engaged in combat is illegal under international law. It would just make Congress complicit in Trump’s crimes.

When the Supreme Court last year granted Donald Trump absolute immunity from any criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken while in office, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the Court was giving presidents a green light to kill. Trump has now apparently acted on that opportunity—by his own count, on at least three separate occasions. Yet, in keeping with his 2016, campaign boast, as far as we can tell Trump has not lost any support to speak of as a result. Indeed, amid the White House’s barrage of daily assaults on the rule of law, the killings seem barely to have registered on the nation’s conscience.

So much of what Trump has done since taking office is beyond the pale that it’s easy to lose track. He’s pardoned the January 6 rioters, even those convicted of violent attacks on police. He’s invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority, to summarily deport Venezuelans, even though we are not at war with that country. He’s dismantled agencies that Congress established, and refused to spend billions of dollars that Congress directed him to spend. He’s tried to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants, in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He’s used pretextual charges of antisemitism to target universities he considers too liberal, and imposed blatantly unconstitutional penalties on law firms for filing cases or hiring attorneys he does not like.

But since long before the founding of this nation, the law has recognized that in the hierarchy of illegal and immoral acts, premeditated murder sits at the very apex. The US remains one of the only democracies to continue to employ the death penalty, a punishment most of the world has rejected as cruel and unusual. But at least there are limits on that sanction. It can only be imposed for homicide (not drug smuggling), and only after a full trial and a robust round of appeals. The hapless—and thus far nameless—persons on board the boats that Donald Trump literally had blown out of the water this month did not even get that. .

—September 25, 2025

Donald Trump and the ghost of "will not die" Jeffrey Epstein files

On July 26, 2025, Donald Trump played a round of golf at his own Turnberry course in Scotland. 

Echo opinion by Fintan O'Toole published in The New York Review of Books: A Guy Who Never Dies

Over footage of the event from Sky News, we hear a reporter shouting, “Mr. Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis?” At that point in the clip, the volume surges on the song Trump’s large entourage is blasting: “Memory” from the musical Cats. The tinny playback of the singer’s voice envelops Trump as he gets back in his golf cart and drives away: “It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun.”

Trump does not look like he’s enjoying the memory of the days when he and Epstein were close friends. But, Donald Trump's staff know this song is an aural comfort blanket for their boss. 

In her memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham writes that “when he was in a bad mood or a scary rage, we’d send for a staffer he referred to as ‘the Music Man.’” This aide would switch on “Trump's favorite songs—‘Memory’ from Cats, the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ and others—and the staffer would go in and play the music to distract or calm him down. It was sort of like soothing the savage beast.”

What is it about “the Jeffrey Epstein crisis” that triggered the urgent need for this auditory pacifier? Ten days before the Turnberry incident, Trump uncharacteristically vented his scary rage on those of his loyal fans who were demanding the release of all official files on Epstein, ranting on Truth Social:

My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will…. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Trump does not normally disavow support from anyone, however vile or extreme. For him to consign a large body of the MAGA base to a PAST (when presumably he and they knew what happiness was) suggests that something about the Epstein story gets under Trump’s very thick skin. It places him, for the first time in his astonishing political career, at the center of a cognitive maze from which he can see no exit.

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. 

Jeffrey Epstein''s ghost: The Trumpian conspiracy that will not die

It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.

Paranoia persists through every era of the history of the American republic. We can, for example, recall President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1961 of the far-right fringes of the Republican party: “They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.”

He could be talking about Trump-world. But not exactly. For not all conspiracy theories work the same way. They can take one of two distinct shapes. The first is a false “explanation” for real events. This is what Kennedy was referring to in 1961:

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British, or tricked by the French, or deceived by the Russians. It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sellout at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the Free World, it was treason in high places.

This is the classic form of the conspiracy theory. There is a genuine and undisputed fact—China going communist, a financial crisis, a military defeat, fluoride in the water, wildfires devouring the land. What is hidden is the surreptitious motive force: Communists, Freemasons, Jews, Jewish Communists, Jewish space lasers.

Yet Trumpian paranoia doesn’t quite take this form. Conspiracy theories are crucial to Trump’s appeal, but his are indifferent to the reality or otherwise of the phenomena they seek to explain. 

Trump's made up conspiracies may relate to external facts. Immigration happened because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris connived to bring “more than 20 million criminals into the country.” An apparently sluggish economy is an illusion created by a “rigged” set of official job creation figures. They can also be pure fabrications: Barack Obama was not born in America. Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. (“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot…. I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death❓”) 

Hillary Clinton was involved in an “unthinkable plot” to rig the 2016, presidential election by linking Trump to interference by Russia. To adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trump’s “imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,…/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Unlike the first, more basic kind of conspiracy theory, Trump’s version does not rely on agreed-upon public facts to generate emotions—fear, distrust, anger. As a federal judge put it in 2023 while dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others in relation to their alleged plot, the suit was “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” “Immaterial events” is an apt phrase: in Trump’s conspiracy theories, there is no genuine surface to go behind. Both the “event” and its “explanation” are cut from whole cloth.

Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them. It is striking, indeed, that when Trump had to provide alleged facts to support his most important conspiracy theory—the stealing of his victory in the 2020, presidential election—he was risibly helpless. He pursued over sixty law cases and all of them were thrown out (some by judges he himself had appointed) or withdrawn because he could not present the courts with anything other than outlandish concoctions.

For the most part, though, Trump has been able to operate in that world of immaterial events. He has been greatly assisted by the potency within his base of a conspiracy theory that is even further removed from the idea of evidence: QAnon. It is not his creation but it overlaps with his own conspiratorial strategies. It has the same free-floating freedom from any agreed reality, the same fictive exuberance.

QAnon, like Trump himself, is a comic provocation that became an American truth. As James Ball showed in his excellent The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence and subsequent publication of a trove of e-mail archives belonging to Clinton’s adviser John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. The Podesta e-mails were disappointingly dull—they disclosed no crimes or conspiracies. But, as Ball explains, they served as the template for a word game played on the Internet forum 4chan:

Whether as a joke, a troll or some sort of political act, a few 4chan users jumped on the Podesta emails and decided to try to stoke up some interest in them. 

One technique worked beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone involved. A group of users decided that the seemingly innocuous emails were in fact a code. “Hotdog,” they decided, meant “boy.” “Pizza” meant “girl.” “Cheese” meant “little girl,” while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute.” The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by key aides of Hillary Clinton—and they had cracked the code used to discuss their crimes.

By 2020, fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos for NPR definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” with 37 percent unsure and 17 percent in agreement. In 2022, Trump semaphored his endorsement of QAnon by reposting an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin bearing the words “The Storm is Coming.” (In QAnon’s arcane lexicon the “storm” is Trump’s version of the Last Judgment, when his satanic opponents will be tried, and perhaps executed, live on television.)

QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016, and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals.

Trump could exploit QAnon because it functions in the way his own conspiracy theories do—in the absence of any agreed reality beyond itself. But only up to a point. That point has a local habitation and a name: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “The real world provided a tantalizing way into the madness of QAnon.” And also the other way around: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites.

And there really are, as the investigative journalist Barry Levine recently noted in The New York Times, unanswered questions about Epstein’s ability to prey on children for so long with such impunity. How did he amass an estimated $600 million? How was he able to traffic girls and women into the US from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan without apparent interference from the immigration authorities? Why was Alex Acosta—who as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida gave Epstein an extraordinary lenient plea deal—told, as he later claimed, that “Mr. Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”? What is contained on the forty computer and electronic devices, twenty-six storage drives, more than seventy CDs, and six recording devices gathered by the FBI from Epstein’s properties?

And what exactly do all of these records say about Epstein’s close friendship over almost fifteen years with Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his pal was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”? In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who did the most to expose the Epstein scandal, recounts claims made in a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims:

Once, Epstein took the girl to Mar-a-Lago, where he introduced her to Donald Trump. She was fourteen at the time and recalls that upon meeting Trump, Epstein elbowed him and said: “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded in agreement, the suit says.

Brown also writes that “in early 2016, an anonymous woman filed a civil complaint in federal court in California, under the pseudonym ‘Katie Johnson.’ She alleged that she was sexually abused and raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period from June to September 1994.”

Such allegations may well be untrue, and of course Trump denies any knowledge of, much less involvement in, Epstein’s crimes. At the time of the Katie Johnson lawsuit Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told the Miami Herald that its claims were “unequivocally false.” (A federal judge dismissed the first Johnson suit in May 2016; two subsequent suits were withdrawn.) Brown notes that “there has never been any evidence that [Trump] had inappropriate sexual relations with minors.” 

Many people have many reasons to want to smear him by association with Epstein, and it is important not to fall into the trap of believing allegations because they chime with established preconceptions.

Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”

When he retweeted that post Trump clearly felt that Epstein really was safely dead and that questions about their long friendship had died with him. But in reality he was breathing life into Epstein’s corpse. To suggest that Epstein was murdered to silence him is to give him a vigorous afterlife of proliferating mysteries. In his current rage at the resurrection of this unfinished story, Trump railed against those who, instead of basking in the glory of his administration, keep talking about “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” This is a strange echo of one of the celebrity tributes received by Epstein on his sixty-third birthday in 2016 and recently published by The New York Times. Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.

It is the hybrid nature of the Epstein conspiracy theory—part rational demand for answers to legitimate public concerns, part QAnon fever dream—that stymies Trump’s response. It generates within the MAGA base what C. Wright Mills once called (in a very different context) crackpot realism, the belief that mad questions (in this case the truth about the satanic pedophile cabal) can be answered by sensible means (reading the trove of documents and examining the recordings that constitute the Epstein files). The word puzzle that began with the substitution of “pizza” with “girl” will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words—if only Trump would do what the Russians did with the Podesta e-mails and set them free.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

Trump’s great tactical mistake in the Epstein story was to keep playing into this belief. In September 2024, in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he went along with the suggestion that he would release the Epstein files alongside those relating to JFK’s assassination: “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

He ought to have known that, because of QAnon, anticipation of the release of the Epstein files is akin more to a millenarian religious fervor than to a documentary investigation. As Ball puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal? It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.

How could Trump find a way out of this maze? There are two threads he is trying to follow. One is to offer his base a substitute conspiracy theory: the whole Epstein story is a fiction, just another malicious invention. “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats…. It’s all been a hoax.” In this he is trying to switch the story from the first kind of conspiracy theory (the one with an objective correlative in real public events) to the second kind (his own practice of positing a conspiracy with no real-world referent). He is hoping to shift Epstein from the kind of ground where he loses his bearings onto the terrain where he feels more comfortable.

But this can’t work. Epstein can’t be turned into a product of the Democrats’ evil imagination because he is every bit as real for the MAGA people as he is for woke liberals. Perhaps, indeed, even more so: he is the tangible substance that gives credibility to their darkest visions of how the world works. In thinking that he can simply order his supporters to convert this substance into a mere shadow thrown by Democratic conspirators, he is succumbing to the dictator’s delusion that he can exert complete control over the thoughts of his subjects.

The second escape route is to offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19. If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along. If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map. And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.

Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function. If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”