The Slow Surrender to Unreality The Pesky Liberals Apr 19 The most revealing moments in a political movement are often not the grand speeches or choreographed ceremonies, but the smaller ruptures that expose what power looks like when it begins to detach from reality. Sometimes it is a half-empty arena where a vice president speaks to rows of vacant seats that no amount of camera framing can conceal. Sometimes it is a president posting frantically in all caps about victory while foreign officials publicly accuse him of fabricating the terms of the very negotiations he claims to control. Sometimes it is the spectacle of a governing class so consumed by mythology that it can no longer distinguish between dominance and humiliation, between propaganda and truth, between performance and consequence. That rupture came into sharper focus when Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf directly challenged Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic declarations about the Strait of Hormuz. In a series of pointed statements, Ghalibaf dismissed Trump’s flood of triumphant posts as fiction, insisting that the United States had not imposed the terms of peace and that the realities of regional power would not be dictated through social media. His message was blunt: passage through the waterway would occur on routes designated by Iran and under Iranian authorization. In a single statement, he stripped away the theatrical language of American victory and replaced it with the harder truth of geopolitical leverage. Trump had spent days presenting himself as the man who had restored order to a global crisis he helped ignite. Iranian officials responded by making clear that Washington had not seized control of the strait at all. Tehran still held the gate. That distinction matters because the battle now unfolding is no longer simply military. It is epistemic. It is a struggle over who gets to define reality itself. Modern authoritarian movements increasingly depend on creating a closed system of meaning in which the leader’s words become more important than observable events. The mechanism is familiar to historians of political cults and high-control movements alike. The leader speaks. Followers repeat. Contradictions are dismissed. Failures are reframed as victories. Humiliation is transformed into strength through sheer repetition. It is not persuasion in the traditional sense. It is psychological enclosure. Trump’s social media barrage declaring the “Strait of Iran” open illustrated that mechanism perfectly. A crisis that had destabilized global shipping lanes, rattled oil markets, strained alliances, and pushed the world toward a wider regional war was recast as a personal triumph. The same strait that had been open before the conflict was now presented as if it had been heroically liberated by the very man whose decisions had helped endanger it. The pattern has become almost ritualistic. A problem is created. Damage spreads outward. The same damage is then rebranded as evidence of strength. Reality becomes subordinate to narrative. What makes this especially dangerous is that the performance increasingly collides with the institutions meant to restrain it. Trump’s declaration that he would personally “prohibit” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from bombing Lebanon revealed more than another abrupt foreign policy reversal. It showed a presidency that has come to treat international diplomacy as an extension of personal authority. Alliances are no longer framed as mutual commitments between nations but as relationships of obedience between men. Foreign leaders become subordinate characters in a story whose central purpose is to reinforce the image of the indispensable leader. Policy becomes theater. The world becomes a stage on which one man attempts to prove he alone can command events. But the deeper instability is not confined to foreign policy. It is also visible in the way millions of people have been conditioned to absorb contradiction without consequence. For years, experts in coercive persuasion have identified a recurring pattern in movements that begin to resemble cultic systems. The leader is always right. Criticism becomes persecution. Any failure is blamed on enemies. Outsiders are depicted as corrupt. Followers are encouraged to reject independent sources of information. The movement becomes not simply political, but existential. To question the leader is to threaten the believer’s sense of identity. The transformation of Trump into a mythic figure has accelerated this process. AI-generated images depicting him as a warrior, a savior, a king, even a Christ-like figure, are not random internet absurdities. They are devotional artifacts. They serve the same psychological function that sacred iconography has served in authoritarian movements for generations. They elevate the leader beyond accountability by turning him into a symbol. Symbols cannot fail. Symbols cannot lie. Symbols can only be betrayed. That symbolic transformation explains why ordinary political scandals increasingly fail to produce ordinary political consequences. A presidency engulfed in legal controversy, war, economic disruption, and open corruption no longer triggers the normal civic reflexes that once protected democratic systems. Instead, each new rupture is metabolized into the mythology. Investigations become witch hunts. Contradictions become evidence of genius. Chaos becomes proof that the leader is battling hidden enemies on behalf of his followers. The movement survives not despite instability, but because instability itself becomes the emotional fuel that keeps the movement alive. That same dynamic can be seen in the strange coexistence of governmental dysfunction and ideological radicalization. Even as foreign crises deepen, domestic institutions continue eroding in quieter ways. Reports that Justice Samuel Alitois not stepping down this term may seem procedural on the surface, but they underscore a broader reality: the architecture of long-term power remains intact even while the daily spectacle dominates public attention. The machinery of influence often advances most effectively when the public is too overwhelmed to notice it moving. At the same time, figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to embody another facet of this cultural decay: the normalization of grotesque behavior through media spectacle. In a healthier political environment, deeply disturbing stories about public officials would provoke moral seriousness. Instead, they become part of the endless churn of outrage, briefly shocking before disappearing beneath the next wave of absurdity. That, too, serves power. A population exhausted by constant chaos becomes easier to govern because outrage loses its staying power. Citizens stop reacting not because the behavior becomes acceptable, but because the system has trained them to believe nothing can be done. And beneath all of this lies the deeper structural truth that often goes unspoken: many of these crises are inseparable from the economic systems that sustain them. The dependence on fossil fuel empires, petrostate alliances, and militarized resource politics has helped create a world where war and energy remain inseparably linked. The struggle over the Strait of Hormuz is not just about a narrow waterway. It is about a global order that has repeatedly allowed a handful of actors to hold entire populations hostage through energy dependence. Every delayed transition, every compromised climate policy, every strategic accommodation with authoritarian oil wealth has compounded that vulnerability. The cost is measured not only in inflation or markets, but in blood. That is why the current moment feels larger than one man, even as one man dominates the image of it. Trump is not the sole cause of what is happening. He is the expression of a political culture that spent decades hollowing out its own democratic immune system. He is what emerges when spectacle replaces civic literacy, when grievance replaces governance, when institutions become too timid to defend themselves, and when mythology becomes more emotionally satisfying than truth. The real danger is not simply that a leader lies. Democracies have survived liars before. The danger is when enough people decide that truth itself no longer matters. Because once a society accepts that power can invent reality as it goes, every crisis becomes easier to manipulate, every institution becomes easier to bend, and every future abuse becomes easier to justify. That is how decline often looks in real time. Not as a single collapse, but as a slow surrender to unreality. A half-empty arena presented as a triumph. A strategic defeat described as dominance. A man remade into a symbol. A public taught to doubt its own eyes. And history shows that once a political movement begins demanding faith instead of judgment, the consequences rarely remain confined to rhetoric for long. The Pesky Liberals is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell The Pesky Liberals that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. Pledge your support   Share     Like Comment Restack   © 2026 The Pesky Liberals 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe

Meet the New Boss; Worse than the Old Boss

 

Meet the New Boss; Worse than the Old Boss

Blanche takes the DOJ to even lower depths.

Harry Litman

Apr 16, 2026

 

When Pam Bondi was sacked earlier this month, amid reports that her firing offense was, of all things, insufficient zeal in securing convictions of Trump’s enemies, the logical question was: just what more could she have done? Bondi had seemingly pulled out every possible stop to deliver the scalps to the King, foiled only by the checks that exist outside DOJ’s walls, especially grand juries that refused to indict the innocent targets she had placed before them.

At the time, the question seemed rhetorical. It wasn’t. In Todd Blanche’s three weeks as Acting AG, he has taken screws that seemed fully turned and tightened them another notch. His initial moves suggest that, hard as it is to conceive, he will be even more vicious, more slavish toward Trump, and more willing to jettison the public interest and the rule of law than was his consummately servile predecessor.

Meet the new boss. Worse than the old boss.

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In 14 months, the shortest confirmed tenure of any Attorney General in 60 years, Bondi managed to eviscerate the mission and good faith of the DOJ to the point where courts that had always assumed the best of government lawyers had begun to assume the worst. It was the antithesis of justice without fear or favor, the Justice Department’s historic watchword: instead, Bondi’s DOJ delivered favor to Trump’s allies and tortured his enemies.

Yet in barely three weeks on the fifth floor, Blanche has done Bondi one better, which is to say the country one worse. The Department, in April, has moved to whitewash the criminal records of the worst January 6 offenders; fired career prosecutors for working righteous cases now in political disfavor; deployed loyalist assistants to intimidate the Federal Reserve in a manner both nakedly political and downright bizarre; and routed a reprisal perjury prosecution to a division with no conceivable jurisdiction over it.

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Start with the most historically consequential. On Tuesday, the Department filed a bare-bones motion in the D.C. Circuit seeking to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the worst January 6 offenders: eight Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, and four Proud Boys, including Joseph Biggs and Ethan Nordean.

These men were the architects of the worst assault on democratic self-governance in our lifetimes. Their prosecutions, for seditious conspiracy, arguably the most serious and demanding charge in the federal arsenal, were the hardest and proudest achievement of the largest criminal investigation in DOJ history.

The seditious conspirators had already received an outrageous windfall when Trump commuted their sentences on his first day back in office. Since then, he has embraced them as “hostages,” “unbelievable patriots,” and “warriors,” and called January 6 itself “a day of love.” The motion to vacate takes this grotesque revisionism to its logical conclusion.

The four-page motion offered no legal argument, no claim of innocence, no suggestion of prosecutorial error. It simply declared that dismissal “is in the interests of justice.”

Whose justice might that be?

On remand, the government will move to dismiss with prejudice, meaning no retrial is ever possible. The legal system will formally reflect that Stewart Rhodes and company committed no January 6-related crimes. At that point, these newly exonerated defendants will be positioned to sue the United States for malicious prosecution, just as Michael Flynn did, walking away with 1.25 million taxpayer dollars. A collection of pardoned January 6 defendants has already brought a class action against the Capitol police officers they overran that day, alleging excessive force. Rhodes and company can now wave their own dismissals with prejudice.

This is not, as Bondi and Trump might suppose, the triumph of one political faction over another. The whitewashing of the worst January 6 crimes is an offense against the entire country, Republicans and Democrats, MAGA and never-Trump alike. The convictions Blanche erases belonged to all of us.

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The second item involves firing people for doing their jobs, and smearing them on the way out.

This week, the Department fired at least four career prosecutors who had worked FACE Act cases under Merrick Garland, simultaneously releasing a 900-page “weaponization” report accusing those same prosecutors of selective enforcement. They got the knife and the smear at the same time.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act was passed in 1994 with bipartisan support, its primary target the physical blockading of abortion clinics, with protections for houses of worship added to bring Republicans along.

The felony cases Garland’s prosecutors brought involved defendants who physically blockaded clinic entrances. Not people standing peacefully with signs. The cases were not close calls. In Washington, D.C., defendants forced their way into a clinic and blockaded the doors while a co-conspirator livestreamed it. In Mount Juliet, Tennessee, a coordinated group physically blocked a patient from receiving care while two ringleaders ran a deliberate deception operation to delay police. That is the conduct Blanche has now declared a firing offense to prosecute.

What makes this doubly perverse is the asymmetry Blanche has enshrined as policy: FACE Act cases involving houses of worship get the Justice Department’s full attention, as with the tenuous prosecution of Don Lemon for covering a protest in a St. Paul church; cases involving abortion clinics are now restricted to “extraordinary circumstances.” Same conduct, same statute, different outcomes depending on the political valence of the victim.

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Then there is Tuesday’s drop-in visit to the Federal Reserve by two prosecutors in Jeanne Pirro’s office and an investigator.

Chief Judge James Boasberg had already quashed Pirro’s subpoenas targeting the Fed in March, finding that the government had produced “essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime” and that the investigation was transparently designed to pressure Powell on interest rates. So Pirro dispatched two prosecutors, Steven Vandervelden and Carlton Davis, to show up unannounced at the Fed’s Washington headquarters and request a tour of the renovation project Trump has cast as the source of Powell’s supposed criminal exposure.

It is hard to overstate how anomalous this is. Prosecutors don’t make unannounced visits to subjects of an investigation and ask for a tour. Beyond that, the Fed is represented by counsel, Robert Hur, the former United States Attorney who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and found no basis for charges. Contacting a represented party without counsel present is a blatant ethical violation. Hur responded with a tart letter advising Pirro’s office that if it wished to challenge Boasberg’s ruling, the courts provided an avenue. That avenue is called an appeal. Pirro has yet to file one.

A word about Vandervelden and Davis. They are also the same Pirro soldiers who previously tried to indict six sitting Democratic members of Congress for taping a video urging military personnel they need not comply with illegal orders. Vandervelden has no prior federal prosecutorial experience; Davis previously served as a congressional staffer and has a single brief stint as an AUSA to his name.

The result: not a single vote to indict. It’s the first total shutout in federal grand jury practice that I’ve ever even heard about. The old saw is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. It wouldn’t bite on the very different malodorous sandwich Vandervelden and Davis were serving.

The only plausible explanation for the Fed field trip is raw intimidation, a rattling of sabers, saying we still have you in our sights. Trump confirmed as much the next morning, telling Fox Business the probe would continue and that it was “more than a criminal probe.” The President of the United States, on camera, volunteered that his prosecutors are doing something other than pursuing criminal justice.

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Finally, there is Cassidy Hutchinson, the then-25-year-old former White House aide whose June 2022 testimony remains one of the most consequential public accounts of Trump’s conduct on January 6. She was a loyal Republican staffer with no political animus toward Trump. She simply told the truth under oath, at considerable personal cost, against documented pressure from her Trump-supplied attorney not to, an attorney she eventually discharged.

The prospective perjury charge centers on her relaying what she had been told by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato about Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle. The Secret Service agent in the car disputed the account; Ornato himself later claimed not to remember telling her. Relaying in good faith what a senior White House official told you is not perjury, by any stretch. The willful and material falsehood the charge requires is nowhere in evidence.

Bondi opened the inquiry in her final weeks as a last-ditch bid to please Trump. Blanche greenlighted the next step: assigning the matter to Harmeet Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division. Dhillon is a longtime Trump personal attorney, an ardent promoter of his 2020 election fraud claims, and an official who has described her mission as not merely slowing civil rights enforcement but “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction.”

But perjury prosecutions are not her job. Every division in the Department has its own bailiwick. I don’t know of a single instance in which the Civil Rights Division has handled a congressional perjury case. There is no institutional authority to do so. The assignment is designed for one purpose: to show Trump that the Hutchinson prosecution is in the hands of a trusted enforcer.

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What distinguishes Blanche, and has earned him particular contempt among former DOJ colleagues, is that he knows better. Bondi was over her head from day one, a Fox News personality dropped into the nation’s premier law enforcement institution. Blanche is a former Assistant United States Attorney who spent years in the Southern District of New York. He knows that the career prosecutors he has fired acted with integrity and dedication to justice. He knows the value of the traditions he is feeding through a meat grinder, because he was formed by them.

Blanche served in a Justice Department where it was forbidden for the White House even to communicate with DOJ about a pending case, and he knows precisely why that rule existed and what its abandonment means. Now he takes pride in turning that rule upside down.

At his first press conference as Acting AG, asked about Trump’s explicit public demands that DOJ investigate his political opponents, Blanche said: “It is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and believes should be investigated. That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.”

Whoa. The Acting Attorney General of the United States describes it as the president’s duty, and a function of his leadership, to order prosecutions of his political enemies. It is a breathtaking characterization of Trump’s corrupt agenda, now become the Department of Justice’s mission statement.

In three weeks, Blanche has made clear there is no floor he recognizes. He is all in, past Bondi, past any limiting principle. We thought we had seen the bottom. We hadn’t.

And that gives rise to one question, also unfortunately not rhetorical: how much lower can he drive the Department of Justice?

Talk to you later.

Krugman.

 

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more   Watch now   Trump Can't Even Surrender Right That was the peace that was  PAUL KRUGMAN APR 18   READ IN APP   Transcript When you’re losing a war, but it’s not an existential defeat, your country, your government can continue pretty much as before. Aside from the humiliation, there’s a well-established technique, which is to declare victory and pull out. But it appears that Trump can’t even pull that off.  Hi, Paul Krugman with a Saturday update on the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and all of that. It’s been clear for a while that the United States has basically lost this war. The goal was to achieve regime change, possibly to take Iran’s uranium. Neither of those is going to happen. The Iranian regime is harder line than it was before. Iran has ended up strengthened because it’s demonstrated its ability to shut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. No way the United States, even under current management, is going to commit ground troops to attempt to really do in Iran’s nuclear program on a sustained basis.  So the indicated strategy was to essentially give up, but claim that something wonderful was accomplished, and that’s certainly something that Trump is good at doing. But he hasn’t been able to pull that off, I think because he himself is incapable of facing reality.  So the Iranians said that they are willing to allow free passage of shipping through the strait, by which it turns out they mean basically passage that stays close to the Iranian coast and pays a toll along the way. Well, what’s our alternative to that? What is it that we want to get?  The United States has started imposing a blockade on Iran, which hurts the Iranians. It does give them a reason to seek a deal, but only if they get something out of it. So if allowing ships to start carrying oil and LNG and fertilizer and helium out of the Gulf allows them to sell their own oil again and to import food, which apparently is an important issue for Iran, then that’s a deal that can be done. It will, in practice, be a strategic defeat for the United States, but something that the Trump administration could try to spin as a victory. But in order to get that, you have to actually deliver on that deal. You can claim that you’re winning and that they’re surrendering, not us, but you have to actually deliver on the deal. What Trump tried to do was to say, great, they’re opening up the strait, but meanwhile, we’re going to continue our blockade. And also, they have promised that we can have the uranium, which they had not.  That doesn’t work. It’s just basic logic. Why would the Iranians agree to a deal if they don’t get a lifting of the US embargo, don’t get their ability to sell oil and their ability to import food back? If that’s what’s going to happen, then you might as well keep the strait blocked. So what was this supposed to be? What was the idea? What was the thinking?  Well, as best I can tell, and this is all speculation now, I don’t think that Trump has taken on board, maybe he’s emotionally incapable of taking on board the reality that he screwed up, that he took us to war and lost, that he, in his mind, still thinks that America has the upper hand and that the Iranians are cowering in fear over the might of the U.S. military, and that he doesn’t need to make any concessions, Does he really believe that? Do we even know? Is really believing a thing that makes sense in his case? Probably not. But to some extent, he is at least incapable of accepting as a basic proposition, never mind in public, but at least in terms of actual policymaking, accepting as a proposition that, well, the U.S. just found the limits to its power, and they turn out to be closer to our goal than they are to the Iranians’ goal. So we basically have to cut our losses by making a deal that leaves the Iranians with some stuff that they didn’t have before.  He can’t seem to do that. But if he doesn’t do that, then the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed. In fact, it’s more closed than before because the Iranians are not managing to export oil, which is new. They were exporting oil before, and now that little bit of supply to the world market has been cut off. It’s about 2% of world oil supply. Not huge, but in a very tight oil market, it is significant. And I have no idea where it goes from here. Once again, we’re in a situation of total uncertainty.  Now, I might be willing to say, maybe I’m misunderstanding, maybe the United States does have, in some sense, more leverage. But, you know, we do have markets. The futures markets are closed for the weekend. So let’s see what happens when they reopen Sunday night. But the prediction markets are open, and for all the problems with the prediction markets, they show very clearly that the perceived probability that the strait would reopen by June 1stspiked last week and is now back basically to where it started. All of a sudden, we’re down to a 30% or so probability of getting the strait open anytime soon, which looks about right. Maybe that’s even a bit high.  But, my God, like I said, we are led by people who not only can’t plan a war right, they can’t even successfully execute a surrender. And that’s a really bad omen, not just for the Iran conflict, but for everything else.