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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The beating heart of democracy (beneath the floorboards) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-12
We begin today with Malcolm Ferguson of The New Republic and new polling from Quinnipiac showing that the tacky shoe salesman is underwater in approvals for his budget bill, most other issues, and overall job approval rating.
A new Quinippiac poll (sic) shows that a majority of Americans are opposed to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, confirming public aversion to a budget bill expected to add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, give a tax break to wealthy people and corporations, and slash critical Medicaid and food stamp programs. Almost half of all voters think Medicaid funding should be increased, not decreased. Only 67 percent of Republicans are in favor of the bill, a byproduct of the conflict between Trump and more conservative, deficit hawk Republicans who are threatening to tank it. 89 percent of Democrats oppose the bill, as well as 57 percent of independents. The same poll found that majorities disapproved of Trump’s handling of a number of other issues as well, including immigration and deportations—once his strongest issue, only 43 percent approve of his handling of the former and 40 percent of the latter. Only 40 percent of voters think he’s doing a good job on the economy, another area he was recently dominant in. His worst issue by far, however, was his handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—where only 34 percent of voters think he’s doing a good job. That is hardly surprising, however, given that Trump had promised repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would end the war immediately upon retaking office. That obviously hasn’t happened; indeed, peace seems further away than ever.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic points out that with the opposition to his political agenda.Trump is doing much the same as the Bolsheviks and the Maoists did in the 20th century.
I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows a lot about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage does. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy. ...More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk’s engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president’s signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government’s credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself. Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones says that even without (the now apologetic) Musk, America remains in the grips of a “technofascist fantasy.”
For all the talk of changing demographics and new coalitions, the most important development in US politics last fall involved money and power: The billionaires who believe their technology will save civilization found common cause with authoritarians who hoped that same technology could help them control it. They realized that, in the end, the things they wanted were mostly the same. The problem was democracy; the solution was technofascism. The idea that a post-liberal, “merit-based” ruling class should use new technologies to govern the rest of us has been building on the right for years. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and former Musk business partner whose condemnation of vacuous startup culture nudged Vice President JD Vance toward Catholicism, once questioned whether “freedom and democracy are compatible.” (This skepticism of the democratic process did not stop him from spending tens of millions of dollars to influence it.) He was neither the first nor the last to suggest that our current political system had set a trap that only a few skilled visionaries could free us from. [...] DOGE offered a glimpse of the technofascist future. It formed the beachhead for a targeted hit on public institutions and their employees in the service of a new, radical, and cash-soaked post-democratic order. The fact that a few were imposing this on the many was the point.
Bertina Kudrin of Lawfare looks generally at the unprecedented number and scale of Trump’s executive orders.
President Trump’s rapid-fire cancellations of his predecessors’ actions—both presidential memoranda and executive orders (EOs)—are unprecedented in modern times. In January and February alone, Trump revoked 91 of President Biden’s executive orders. Sixty-seven of those revocations came in a single EO (EO 14148, “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions”), representing the most extensive set of revocations ever issued in one EO. The revocations are not limited to Biden’s actions. For example, Trump revoked an Obama-era order protecting LGBTQ+ federal contractors, as well as the underlying policy for the order, first established by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. In March, President Trump introduced another sweeping EO titled “Additional Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” (EO 14236), a follow-up to EO 14148. EO 14236 revokes previous EOs concerning the following: the COVID-19 response, the foreign policy workforce and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), global LGBTQ+ rights, worker wages and unions, the usage of the Defense Production Act (DPA), the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, tribal self-determination, labor rights and international standards, and labor standards in federal investments. The EO is significant, as it is part of an ongoing trend by the Trump administration to use EOs to dismantle the policies of previous administrations on a large scale. To better understand this trend, it is valuable to examine the contents of EO 14236 and situate them in the context of the administration’s other actions.
Lori Corbet Mann writes for the “Your Time Starts Now” Substack specifically about the massive and far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s cybersecurity with Executive Order 14306.
When the government controls how software is made, it also controls what can be built, who can build it, and how it’s allowed to function. This EO speeds up changes to federal cybersecurity frameworks which govern the standards for building and securing software used by government agencies, contractors, and critical infrastructure like power or transport. The preliminary version is now due by December 1, 2025, and a final version 120 days later. While this won’t cover all software by law, in practice, these standards will ripple outward. If your software needs to connect to government networks, meet legal requirements, or run on widely used platforms, it has to follow the new standards. Otherwise, it may be blocked or made unusable.
For the end-users this matters because only approved software will continue to work as expected. That software can be designed to collect data, monitor activity, and control how your devices behave. Over time, alternatives may quietly disappear. This isn’t just about losing options. It’s a way to embed government rules into the digital tools people use every day — like apps, websites, and devices — so they can silently shape what you’re allowed to do, say, or access online.
Finally today, a visiting scholar at Harvard, Alberto López Ortega, writes for El País in English on what it feels like to be considered a problem.
For months, I’ve been studying at Harvard how liberal democracies die not from frontal attacks, but from the perverse exploitation of worthy causes. My research at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies focuses precisely on how anti-democratic movements hijack liberal banners—feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism—to undermine democratic institutions from within. I never imagined that my own status as an international researcher would become a real-time case study. [...] What’s at stake goes far beyond my J-1 visa or the 6,800 international students who represent 27% of Harvard’s student body. The United States is committing a spectacular act of academic self-sabotage. While China climbs the ranks in the Nature Index with nine of the top 10 scientific research institutions, Trump has declared war on the only American university still at the top of that list: Harvard. The numbers are devastating. International students contribute more than $40 billion annually to the U.S. economy and support 380,000 jobs. Of the 10 largest tech companies in the country, half are run by immigrants. Elon Musk himself wouldn’t have built Tesla in the United States if Trump’s anti-foreign student policies had been in place when he arrived from South Africa. Sergei Brin wouldn’t have developed Google. Jensen Huang wouldn’t have created Nvidia. But the damage goes beyond economic metrics. The fight against Harvard isn’t just a fight against a university; it’s against an idea. The idea that talent has no passport, that knowledge knows no boundaries, that the best minds in the world can gather in one place to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Have the best possible day that you can!
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