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Sincerest apologies to anyone who missed my earlier, equally sincere apologies. When I published last week’s mailbag [ [link removed] ], I somehow clicked on (or Substack somehow defaulted me to) the setting that closes comments, so for almost an hour after the piece ran, comments were locked.
Bad way to introduce a new feature that depends on comments! Fortunately (?) I’ll be neurotic to a fault going forward about making sure the correct box is checked, and hopefully that’ll allow more of you to ask questions. I may not be able to answer them all every week, but I hate to discourage readers from asking.
Now, on to this week’s mailbag. If you have questions for next week, feel free to drop them in the comments. Or bookmark this post and return to it as news develops.
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Andrew [ [link removed] ]: The national stage is a mess and can be intimidating to folks looking to begin making a difference. What’s your guidance for how to be involved at the local level? Obviously there’s things like city council, school board, county commissioner but there must be other ways that don’t necessarily involve running for office and dealing with whatever the current political machine in your area is? I feel like the local resistance is the most accessible way to push back and force the Feds to realize we separate powers for a reason but the resources and supports for that level of involvement seem difficult to find.
So, first, I don’t want to give short shrift to running for office. Life brought me to Washington, DC, and life kept me here, but for really the first time in my writing career, I keep thinking that if Kelley and I had taken this show on the road at some point in the past several years, and we had a Republican representative or a Democratic representative who needed primarying, I’d launch a campaign. Maybe you have to know me personally to understand how crazy that is, how much the experience of the past nine (really the past six) years have radicalized me. But I’d like to see dozens, even hundreds of candidates interrupting the regular flow of things to say, “no more GOP authoritarian bullshit, and no more limp Democrats.” Even if most of them went on to lose it would move things in a healthier direction.
I know Mike Sacks a little from his HuffPost days, and I was so surprised and happy to see this yesterday.
Beyond running for office, I will tick off the things I usually tick off: Connect with your local Indivisible [ [link removed] ] group. Drop by your local Dem Party HQ and see how you can be of help. Band together with people in your community to demand face time with your representatives, and go in to those meetings with a clear agenda. If you don’t want to serve, but know community leaders who would do better than incumbents, encourage them to run for office.
More contingently: Whatever your current role happens to be, commit to yourself now that you won’t roll over if the administration comes to town to attack your local institutions or harass people in your community. Read this letter via [ [link removed] ]Rick Perlstein from a school principal at Sackets Harbor, NY [ [link removed] ], and try to buck up yourself—along with your friends, family, and peers—to be brave in the same way if and when the time comes.
Jonathan Rabinowitz [ [link removed] ]: What's your take on Josh Marshall's "inverse Pyrrhic victory" [ [link removed] ] line today about Schumer and the CR? Is this actually the thing that gets D senators off the floor and acting to protect the Republic?
Fun story: When the Signal disclosure story broke, a friend and colleague who thinks Chuck Schumer made the right call messaged me to rub it in: Imagine if the Signal scandal couldn’t break through because we were all too consumed by an ongoing government shutdown?
My response, in so many words, was that a huge scandal uncovering Trump administration lawlessness, amid a shutdown aimed at reining in Trump administration lawlessness, might just as well be synergistic. A shutdown could, of course, overshadow a national-security scandal, but it could also increase pressure on Republicans to cave.
Well, the Signal scandal started to fade all on its own, and got horribly overshadowed by something existential. And as we slump into recession or worse I find myself thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice if Democrats had some leverage close at hand to force House Republicans to vote on Trump’s abuse of tariff authority?
I think the best we can say about Schumer’s decision is that, as a silver lining, it probably inspired a handful of rank-and-file Democrats to take matters into their own hands, and helped galvanize millions of grassroots Democrats to join local and national protest movements.
But doing the least disruptive thing is not always the safest move, and looking for ex post evidence to vindicate risk aversion leads to sloppy thinking. It reminds me a bit of the 2020 primary, when my moderate friends and frenemies said Democrats should nominate Joe Biden (already marble-mouthed and elderly) because, a year out, he polled slightly better than other candidates in head-to-heads against Trump. Then, when Biden won by a scarily slim and disappointing margin, they asserted “see, everyone else would have lost!’”
A tendentious fallacy.
The point, then and now, is we don’t know. We don’t know how the public would have perceived another candidate in 2020. We don’t know if today’s revived protest movement would have ripened on its own. We don’t know whether Booker would’ve mounted his talking filibuster anyhow. We also don’t know if Trump would’ve even imposed his tariffs in the midst of a domestic crisis like a government shutdown.
All we know is that we were, and remain, on the road to hell, and we bypassed an offramp. That offramp might have led to salvation or to a shortcut to the original destination. But, to switch metaphors, when you’re sliding down a cliff, you should grasp at every rock and nook and root within reach, instead of assuming the canopy below will soften your landing.
Aaron [ [link removed] ]: 100% agree with your take on Trump and tariffs. What I don’t know how to predict is whether the chaos and backlash to the chaos will cause him to change tactics at all.
In the interest of transparency, here’s what I had written up for you as of Wednesday morning:
We’re past fuck around and well into the find out stage. I also don’t know if Trump will cave or if Republicans in Congress will bow to pressure to rein him in, or if they’ll all dig in until they cause irreversible damage.
As in my above answer, nobody can know from the outside. And the handful of people who might know are likelier to make corrupt trades on their insider political knowledge than to alert the public. Amid previous crises, under relatively normal governments (2008, for instance) you could map out where we were headed with some confidence, because you could take it on faith that the government was actually trying to solve the problem. Now it’s just pure punditry and mind reading.
Unlike in my above answer, though, we’ll find out soon.
Well, we found out soon! What we found out is useful, and also a little nuts. Trump is fine with triggering a recession, but will blink if he thinks he might cause (and be blamed for) a global financial crisis. I don’t know if anyone reading was awake around midnight Tuesday ET, watching the interest rate on 10 year treasuries spike, but I was, and I hadn’t experienced such a sinking feeling since early 2020, or maybe ever. (I was 25 when the 2008 financial crisis began, and I understood its significance, but I had a younger person’s sense of invulnerability at the time, and basically nothing on the line personally).
It took that kind of near catastrophe to make Trump blink. And if you’re willing to court that much risk (with the economy, or in a military standoff) you’re revealing you’ll let things come one simple misunderstanding away from destroying the world. I think that’s disqualifying all on its own—the option to not be a reckless piece of shit is right there. But it provides valuable information to other world leaders, and to Democrats as we approach the debt limit deadline.
Brian Kichler [ [link removed] ]: In all of the insanity surrounding this self-immolation, I didn’t think to question Trump’s math or ask if the tariff policy was written by LLM. But the math is completely non-sensical, and it seems like they did in fact just ask an LLM to write their order:
This looks like a major scandal, but I don’t see anything in the NYTimes coverage (yet). Any thoughts?
It’s definitely a question worth asking when these folks end up testifying before Congress. Some of them already testified this week, so it’s possible someone already asked—I was too busy with other things to track more than just the highlights. My top investigative question is who, in Trump’s orbit, traded on advanced insider knowledge of Trump’s moves. But this would be in the next tier—like the Signal scandal, but for blowing up the economy.
I do think the fact that they accidentally included uninhabited islands on the list of tariffed territories suggests they relied for at least part of this shitshow on AI or some other lazy tech alternative to serious work. We definitely deserve to know more.
Hank Hoffman [ [link removed] ]: As I understand it, on April 20, Trump is expected to get a “recommendation” as to whether to invoke the Insurrection Act. Given how everything’s been going, it certainly seems likely the recommendation will be to do so. What are the chances that Democrats not only in the U.S. House and Senate but also governors and attorneys general in blue states are engaged in detailed strategic planning for such a possibility? (Unfortunately, this seems likely a rhetorical question.) Seems like that would be an important thing to prepare for!
I’ve seen this idea floating around on social media, and as near as I can tell it’s rumor, but (given the character of the people in charge) it’s also the kind of rumor that could turn out to be true, even if it was originally based on nothing.
So to your question: The idea that officials should prepare for an Insurrection Act standoff, or for some comparable standoff involving Trump and state National Guards, has definitely circulated among people with some reach into Democratic politics. Whether those Democrats have taken the initiative to do any planning is a question I can’t answer. My hunch is that at least some Dem governors and attorneys general have done some contingency planning—the AGs in particular have been well organized and prepared for a bunch of surprises—but that Dems in Congress (who’ve been caught flatfooted by completely unsurprising events) have not.
For any readers who find themselves at a town hall event with Tim Walz, it’d be a good question for him in particular. He’s the only Dem governor I’m aware of who served as a guardsman. ...

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