What We're Reading Now 

One Law, Many Truths

March 23, 2025 Edition

“It’s not true that Donald Trump believes in nothing,” Salon.com’s Executive Editor, Andrew O’Hehir, writes in “Donald Trump's first law: There is no law,” an article published on February 23rd. “He believes that there is no law and that his will can shape reality. This has yet to be disproven, to his or anyone else’s satisfaction.”

For O’Hehir, a sharp critic of the former and current occupant of the White House, and for the millions of Americans of like mind, the last decade and counting has been a parade of extreme, Trump-fueled dissatisfaction: the disaster of the 2016 election and his first term, his massive mishandling of the Covid pandemic, the January 6th insurrection, and Trump's subsequent re-election last November—despite lawsuits, criminal convictions, impeachments, public embarrassments, and the list goes on.
 
Since January 20th, it’s been nothing less than a shock-and-awe series of assaults on democracy: reality shaped by the will of an aspiring dictator, whom O’Hehir accurately labels “a shameless cheat and hustler in business, a many-times-accused sexual predator in personal life and a pathological fabricator of sadistic lies in politics”—and, somehow, this country’s 47th president.

The Salon editor observes that many Americans “who didn’t vote for him and never would, and have no desire to follow him into the savagely self-destructive land of MAGA fantasy,” nonetheless “recognize that Trump has at least half a point about the fragile or mythical nature of the rule of law, even if we wish it weren’t so.” (understatement!)

“In that realm,” O’Hehir concludes (giving his excellent article its title), “Trump’s first law is that there is no law.” To round out the piece, he lists in detail what he calls “the four great truths of the Trump era that have made his first law come very close to enacting itself.”

The first two are analyses of flaws in the U.S. political system and the very design of the constitution that have allowed Trump and his followers to ascend to—and consequently abuse—power; the second two look at the rules-based international order and global democracy’s existential crisis of legitimacy, which this administration is hell-bent on exploiting to its own cynical, and potentially terrifying, ends. 

About all four truths, O’Hehir minces no words. “If America and the world do not acknowledge and confront these truths," he warns, "an even larger one will overtake them: the final collapse of liberal democracy.”

Read Andrew O'Hehir's article on Salon

The Devil's Details

March 16, 2025 Edition

Recently on The Intercept, one of our go-to websites for political analysis and investigative reporting, an article was posted that focuses on the shocking case of Mahmoud Khalil. 

The Columbia University graduate student, who is a Palestinian activist and legal U.S. resident, has been a focus of both mainstream and progressive news outlets since last weekend when he was arrested at his university-owned apartment in Manhattan by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and secreted away to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. It took his wife, who witnessed the arrest and is eight months pregnant, more than 24 hours to discover his whereabouts.

The reason for the ICE action? As reported by The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard in her March 10th article, “If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X the previous day that the Trump administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Khalil, who had broken no laws in his ongoing exercise of free speech while organizing protests against Israel’s U.S.-backed war in Gaza, had become a target of Trump, Rubio, and pro-Israel actors with influence over the White House. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Khalil’s public support of his fellow Palestinians’ rights in Gaza would or could equate to support of Hamas. But these are clearly just insignificant details to Rubio’s boss and those who advise him.
 
“The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters,” Lennard writes in her excellent article. “It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and non-citizens alike. This is settled constitutional law.”

“There is no going back from this point,” The Intercept reporter alarmingly adds. “President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process.”

Which begs the equally alarming question addressed by Lennard, later in her piece, about the ability of free speech in this country to survive the current occupant of the White House: “Who’s next? Citizens?” 

Indeed, as Lennard’s article title makes clear, if this authoritarian administration can succeed in deporting a green card-holding resident for exercising his legal right to free speech, then that right is imperiled for everyone else.

Read Natasha Lennard's article on The Intercept

Your feedback is important to us. If you have any comments, concerns and suggestions, please share it with us. Send Feedback