Rulers And Rulebreakers
Incoherent diplomacy abroad, brazen corruption at home.
Or, to put it another way…
Not for the first time in this presidential term, the spectre of Richard Nixon has been hovering over the current occupant of the White House; and not just because of the operatic potential of this remarkable moment.
Nixon famously said that the American people “deserve to know whether their President is a crook”. For the people who twice put Donald Trump in that office and have enabled and excused him since, the modern-day response seems to range anywhere from “Meh” to “What if he is? You want to take this outside, Libtard?”
Almost a decade after Trump’s previous visit to China as US president, David Lurie at Public Notice called last week’s meeting a “summit of unequals”. Trump “clearly had an agenda,” Lurie wrote, “that of being a supplicant, willing to beg Xi for help addressing the many catastrophic consequences of his own misrule.”
Other observers watched the same scene unfold. David Smith at The Guardian wrote that the visit was Trump’s “strongman fantasy made flesh,” while in dissecting the trip, Dean Blundell calls Trump’s subservience “the most humiliating performance by an American President on foreign soil in the history of the office.”
David Lurie concludes:
“Decades ago, critics attacked Kissinger and Nixon for the amorality of their approach to foreign policy, which openly sacrificed principle for what the two deemed to be US interests. But in the era of Trump — who is not only wholly amoral, but also entirely unconcerned with the interests of the country he leads — the Nixon era almost seems like the good old days.”
Asked later what he felt he had gained from the summit, Trump predictably talked up the “personal relationship” he claims to have with China’s leader, but once more, as Anton Troianovsky reported at The New York Times, US foreign policy now seems to “rest on the belief that [Trump] can defend U.S. interests through charm and force of will.”
“A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked at a briefing during the summit whether Mr. Xi considered Mr. Trump a friend, responded with boilerplate: “the two sides exchanged views on major issues.”
From a diplomatic perspective, that deference would probably be bad enough in itself, but Taiwan now appears to be in play after Trump’s remarks about withholding arms sales as a way of somehow gaining leverage over China. Charlie Sykes wrote about Trump’s predictably triggered reaction to President Xi’s comments about America’s “decline”.
Having returned home to a deeply unpopular war from which he has failed to extricate himself, Trump appeared to warn Iran then step back from a resumption of military action all within 24 hours. US intelligence indicated that Iran’s remaining missile capability was stronger than the administration had previously asserted.
Paul Waldman writes: “All [Iran’s leaders] understand is bombs,” Trump reportedly told an aide, which is quite clearly the opposite of the truth; if anything, he was describing himself.”
“As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the last century of warfare could have told him, the side with the biggest bombs doesn’t always win. And threats do not seem sufficient to convince Iran to give up its control of the strait, which turned out to be the most important piece of leverage it has.”
It’s probably no surprise that after Trump’s departure from China, Russian president Vladimir Putin heads there today, saying Moscow and Beijing do not wish to align against any other country but work together for “peace and universal prosperity” blah blah blah…
It’s been said many times, but if the current US president had entered office openly pledging to enact Putin’s foreign policy, how, honestly, might things have turned out any differently?
With the tide apparently turning in Russia’s war against its neighbor Ukraine, the Pentagon decided to cancel the rotation of 4,000 US troops to Poland, a deployment which Warsaw sees as “key to its ability to deter Russia”. The move comes on the heels of Trump’s Executive Order to draw down at least 5,000 US service personnel in Germany.
The US, meanwhile, continues to put pressure on Cuba, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip last week to Havana and increasing numbers of spy flights over the island providing the backdrop for the threatened arrest of its former president Raúl Castro in what the US may think will be its Venezuela redux that Iran clearly was not.
Domestically, the new US counterterrorism strategy expands the broad definition of its remit, and as ProPublica outlines “makes no mention of long-established threats posed by far-right militants and instead villainizes the president’s political enemies.”
“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”
Trump himself continues to set the parameters for what passes for his own foreign policy platforms late at night on social media, leading to even greater speculation about his physical and mental health as he approaches his 80th birthday.
Jonathan Lemire writes at The Atlantic:
“..his recent behavior should prompt even more questions than usual about his stability, judgment, and mental sharpness. Among the points of concern: a late-night social-media storm a few days ago featuring more than 50 messages, many strewn with dangerous or nonsensical misinformation, which followed a similar Truth Social broadside weeks earlier; an apocalyptic threat to wipe out a civilization; more and more insults (“nasty,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “treasonous”) hurled at reporters; appearing to fall asleep in public, sometimes twice in one week; deep bruises on his hands, which are covered in makeup and accompanied by confusing explanations; and long, odd tangents in speeches that seem longer and odder than his usual tangents.
“Never known for his ability to self-censor, Trump seems to have completely abandoned any sort of filter, tossing out messages from one extreme (He’s glad that Robert Mueller is dead!) to the other (actually, Trump is Jesus and shall heal the sick).”
See Also:
‘Everlasting Consequences’ (From June 2025)
Talking Heads (From May 2025)
‘Once In A Generation Moment’ (From February 2025)
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Election ‘integrity’?
With protests in Selma, Alabama at the weekend acting as a symbolic focal point, particularly among young voters, in opposition to the Supreme Court’s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, attention today turns to a number of key primary elections.
(You can follow live results on Tuesday night here via The New York Times)
In the most expensive House primary race ever, Donald Trump has targeted Kentucky Rep Thomas Massie as the president attempts to further silence opposition within his own party, particularly in light of Massie’s commitment to full release of the Epstein files.
Update – He did not.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even found time during the – again, unprecedentedly unpopular – war to go to Kentucky to campaign for Massie’s opponent; a sign of either how confident or anxious Trump might have been over the outcome.
Trump also said he was endorsing Texas AG Ken Paxton over sitting Senator John Cornyn in next week’s GOP runoff to take on Democrat James Talarico in November. Republicans have not lost a state-wide election in the state since 1994, and now the party is going to have to spend another roughly $100m on the run-off.
Trump, of course, made the announcement after taking reporters on a tour of his ballroom construction project – something that’s unsettling some within his party who will have to defend their support for it come election time.
“Given the volume of Trump’s politically unhelpful gambits these days, it’s almost like he is trying to create political problems for his party ahead of an increasingly fraught 2026 midterm election.
“And Republicans might want to start asking themselves what they do if Trump doesn’t cut it out soon.”
But having already rid himself - after the next few unpredictable months - of troublesome physician Sen Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, as well as those who dared to oppose him in Indiana, Trump’s apparent tightening of his grip on GOP primary voters as his personal approval sinks still further comes at a moment when Republicans seem to have regained the momentum on re-districting, in the wake of the Scotus judgment and the overturning of Virginia’s re-drawn map.
As Virginia Democrats considered next steps, an interesting theoretical solution was open to them. As Quinn Yeargain writes at The Downballot, it would involve retiring the existing state supreme court en masse.
They won’t be taking that road, but that it might even be discussed shows the level of valid frustration among Democrats.
Meanwhile across the South, righteous anger swept through several state legislatures, from Tennessee to Louisiana, to South Carolina, to, of course, Alabama.
What say you, Coach?
With election deniers seemingly again in the ascendent on the Republican side, Trump has talked about setting up an “Election Integrity Army” to operate in all 50 states.
In case you missed it, Colorado’s Democratic Gov Jared Polis this week commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the former election clerk and Trump ally who was sentenced to nine years for interfering with voter data after the 2020 election. Colorado’s Secretary of State called the decision “a dark day for democracy” and said that “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump is an affront to the rule of law.”
Into this boiling cauldron of chaos dropped the ludicrous pantomime of the $1.776 billion IRS “settlement” Trump apparently reached with himself ahead of the May 20 deadline when a judge could have thrown out his original $10 billion suit. Trump apparently now plans to create what the White House called an “anti-weaponization fund”.
As CBS News reports, Trump’s Justice Department will now control “an unprecedented amount of taxpayer money to potentially dole out to those it deems wrongly investigated or prosecuted.”
Staggeringly – or, really, perhaps not given recent moves towards allowing Trump to destroy his records before leaving office – another part of the brazen “settlement” (and Harry Litman explains in detail exactly why it’s not a settlement) involves Trump, his family and corporations being forever shielded from any prosecution by the IRS.
House Democrats moved to block the arrangement, saying it “raises the spectre of corruption unparalleled in American history.” Dan Rodricks called it “Full-on Dictator Stuff”.
“The professional administration of justice — the investigation and prosecution of criminality — can only be accurately described as “weaponized” when it unfairly targets Americans for some political or personal reason, when there is no probable cause for the pursuit. Federal law enforcement authorities had a responsibility to investigate Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. They had a responsibility to bring the Jan. 6 attackers to justice.
“Those who stormed the Capitol and attacked police did not deserve clemency; they do not deserve compensation.”
It’s apparently not enough simply to pardon wrongdoers; now Trump may be preparing to financially reward the people who rioted on his behalf, thus incentivising them to do so again. As Timothy Snyder recently suggested, the man who has already once tried to overturn an election is recruiting “warriors” for a coup.
As Trump himself is prone to say all too often, no-one has ever seen anything like this before.
The two sides clearly perceive different causative issues when it comes to the likelihood of contested election outcomes; while Democrats see voter suppression, Republicans cling to voter “fraud” as part of a narrative fed to them frequently packaged within the hot-button theme of immigration.
Susan Page asked at USA Today: Can our politics get any more polarized?
Yes. These days, the answer to that question is always yes.
See Also:
There’s More Than One Way To Win (From February)
Vote While You Still Can (From November 2025)
Fight Fire With Fire Until The House Burns Down (From August 2025)
January 6th Riot ‘Doesn’t Happen Without Trump’ (From January 2025)
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This Will Look Great In His Baalroom
Pastor Mark Burns, the long-time Trump ally who organised the installation of the “Don Colossus” statue at Trump’s Doral golf course, felt he had something to clarify.
When you’re explaining, you’re losing, right?
Not if you don’t think you are. And none of Trump’s acolytes ever think they’re losing.
Perhaps astonishingly, Burns sat for an interview with Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker this week. It went pretty much as you’d expect.
The Doral “ceremony” came ahead of this past weekend’s nine-hour religious rally on the Mall in the nation’s capital, ostensibly under the auspices of the nation’s 250th birthday.
Chris Lehmann at The Nation took a look at the scheduled speaker list.
“These belligerent apostles of MAGA impunity are, it bears reminding, a universe away from an American founding that sought to firmly distance itself from the corruptions of state-established religion—and expressly stipulated in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by John Adams, that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
“The MAGA grifters presiding over Sunday’s rally are also defying the religious-liberty case for the separation of church and state—it was, after all, leaders of the breakaway Baptist denomination, not a clutch of secular Enlightenment philosophes, who successfully fought to disestablish the Massachusetts Congregational Church in the 18th century, and create a model of competitive worship free from state interference for their many later successors.”
The end result was, predictably, to further heighten concerns about the future of the separation of church and state.
Totally coincidentally, of course, Sunday’s ballgame at Nationals Park was disrupted by the unfurling of a white nationalist-themed banner. The Nationals have banned one of the individuals responsible. No word yet on whether the ban might be extended to other MLB parks.
In Trumpworld, though, everything now is even more performative and more about self-glorification and – primarily it seems – open and unrestrained corruption.
As well as the ridiculously audacious IRS scheme mentioned earlier, the brazen and urgent stampede towards self-enrichment continues – it’s almost as if he knows he’s running out of time, one way or another. Trump’s personal 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of the year is just the latest thing to throw the spotlight on the widespread, consequence-free profiteering under this president’s watch.
But no-one – certainly no-one among Republicans in Congress or on the Supreme Court in a position to do anything about it – seems to care whether any of this is constitutional or even legal.
Trump is also thought to be considering granting “250 Pardons” to mark the nation’s anniversary, which he could hand out not on July 4, but on his own birthday on June 14. But, not so fast… some of Trump’s existing pardon recipients may face a congressional investigation over “pay-to-play dynamics”.
Liz Oyer talked to Ruth Marcus at The New Yorker recently about Trump’s “pardon economy”.
And looking ahead, as we must, Scott Dworkin reminds us, Day One Wipes The Rest.
“The day the next president takes the oath, every executive order Trump signed can be rescinded. Trump proved it himself—he did it to dozens of Biden orders on day one. The mass deportation orders. The DEI bans. The funding freezes. Gone. Federal workers walk back into the agencies that fired them. The rebuilding starts that day.
“The agencies come back too. USAID. The Institute of Peace. The CFPB. The Department of Education. Every one was created by Congress, not the president.
“Trump’s people can hollow out the buildings. They can’t delete the laws. Statutes survive presidents. Day one is real. It’s not a fantasy. It’s one election away.”
Joyce Vance, in a column simply titled “Kleptocracy”, writes:
“One of the most troubling things about Trump’s second presidency is that fraud and corruption have been completely normalized. There’s no call for accountability. And it’s a long list. Trump crypto. Trump pumping up Palantir stock after buying a sizable amount for himself. The Campaign Legal Center has a 38-page report, last updated in February, called “Trump’s Corrupt Transactions.” But it all pales in comparison to what began to unfold last week.”
As for the Trump family’s marketing of gaudy golden cellphones – well, apparently that’s just not happening now; but when you think about it, what’s the difference between this and his memecoins or NFTs? You still give him your money and get nothing in return.
And of course, there’s this, as an indicator of the current culture.
Even Sean Duffy’s family reality show road trip sponsored by companies he regulates as Transportation Secretary seems small potatoes by comparison.
All this at a time, it no longer needs to be said, where affordability, gas prices and the economy generally are seeing the impact of the president’s actions in fundamental dollars-and-cents terms. The language of real American households, not the fantasy world that most people’s financial situations represent to the administration.
Last week I mentioned that I’d filled up our car and thought that next time the price would likely be around $5 a gallon. Sure enough…
Finally, the suspect in the alleged shooting plot at the White House Correspondents Dinner – remember that? – pleaded not guilty. Perhaps predictably, a poll this week suggested that about half of Americans either believe the incident was staged or aren’t sure of the truth.
See Also:
The Only Restraint Is ‘My Own Morality’ (From January)
Happy Birthday To Me (From February)
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As always, thanks for reading. When I started this project in 2022, I simply did not expect how wildly out of whack things in the political world were about to become; all while sports continue to show the face of a society functioning with what passes for ‘normality’.
As for how all of this ends – and what might come after – I have no idea. And if anyone tells you they do, they’re just plain wrong. Unpredictability at home and abroad has become the touchstone of how we have decided to govern ourselves and there will be plenty of collateral damage before the dust clears.
The two links in the above paragraphs change with each weekly column – the pieces are definitely worth reading. They’re all linked here:
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During the regular season I aim to write a baseball-related post midweek and a politics wrap at weekends. As you might expect, one has been relatively more sane than the other.
I’ll also be sending out some invites for more Q&A write-ups and will aim to produce some new content for the site.
Let me know what you’ve enjoyed or what you haven’t? And if you think you might like to take part and talk about your memories of baseball and politics, drop me a line? Here’s how it works.
You can, of course, find a full States of Play substack archive here, and the original site here.