The Trump Administration Just Keeps Losing in Court...

It's not exactly a secret that lawsuits brought by the Trump administration don't generally go well in court, outside of the Supreme Court. But even with that caveat, the White House has been on a very bad run lately, with judges across the land saying: "Yeah, I don't think so."

We'll start with a decision that actually came down late last week. In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ruled that the Department of Justice's demand for Maryland's voting lists, a demand based on alleged "authority" granted by the Civil Rights Act of 1965, doesn't pass muster. She dismissed the suit, based on the somewhat embarrassing finding that the administration failed to make a valid legal claim. And she dismissed with prejudice, which means the case cannot be refiled (an appeal is still possible, of course).

The Trump Administration has brought 31 such suits against blue states/purple states/Washington, DC. Of the 31 suits, 9 have been adjudicated, and thus far the White House is 0-9. That does not bode well for the other 22 suits, to say the least. And in case you are wondering. five of those nine judges, including Gallagher, are Trump appointees. So, one can hardly argue that Team Trump has been a victim of judicial partisanship. Not that Trump and acting AG Todd Blanche won't try.

And now we move on to a trio of losses that were announced yesterday. First up, and very much along the same lines as the Maryland case, the Trump administration has been trying to create a centralized database with Social Security numbers, information about voters' citizenship status, and other private data. This is a project that began, of course, with the DOGEys, and their utterly lawless data mining conducted while they ran roughshod over the government's computers. In fact, you could argue that this was the real raison d'être for DOGE, and that the completely ineffectual "cost cutting" was just a red herring to throw people off the scent.

Beyond the privacy issues involved here, there is no doubt that the purpose of the database is to stop legitimate (and disproportionately Democratic) voters from casting ballots. The League of Women Voters (and other voter-advocacy groups) certainly know this, and so filed suit. And yesterday, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who sits in the District of Columbia, issued her ruling. She found that the project violates the Social Security Act, Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act, and said the database has to go, immediately. Maybe the Trump administration can put up a tarp around the server that houses the database, to try to hide their shame. Sooknanan, incidentally, is a Joe Biden appointee. So, Trump and acting AG Blanche will definitely blame her, and not, say, their own lack of competence.

Next up, and getting a lot of attention, is a decision out of Minnesota, from U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz. The Judge was asked to consider the subpoenas that the DoJ (somehow) secured in its pursuit of Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN) and several of his allies. And he was, in a word, unimpressed. Or, if you prefer several words, here's the money passage from his ruling:

Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action—particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take—is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use the [sic] grand-jury process

As you might guess, Schiltz quashed the subpoenas. Oh, and he's a George W. Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia and who was a mentor to Amy Coney Barrett. So again, hard to argue judicial partisanship here. Not that Trump and acting AG Todd Blanche won't try.

And the final Trump setback yesterday was courtesy of U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is a frequent thorn in the side of the administration, and who also sits in Washington, DC. The issue in this suit is actually kind of interesting, and crosses partisan lines. For many years, (some) politicians in both parties have argued that if a person is going to receive SNAP benefits, states should be able to limit those benefits to the purchase of "healthy" foods. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, whose department oversees SNAP, and who is a MAHA ally of "Health" and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., thought that was a fine idea, and so implemented it essentially unilaterally.

This may seem commonsense, at first glance, but there are some significant issues that make it not so simple. First, many Americans live in so-called "food deserts," where access to anything beyond junky food (purchased mostly at convenience stores and fast-food restaurants) is limited. As you might imagine, poorer people—the same ones who get SNAP—are most likely to live in these deserts.

Second, "healthy" is a very fungible and judgment-laden term, particularly when MAHA types are involved in making the judgments. For example, someone who is diabetic, and whose blood sugar drops, actually needs something like chocolate or hard candies—those things are not junk food, in that case. Similarly, someone affected with nausea (say, a chemotherapy patient) may need some 7-Up or ginger ale—again, those things are not junk food, in that case. On the other end of the spectrum, McDonalds once offered the "Keep Calm, Caesar On" kale salad with Asiago Caesar dressing. Which do you think is more likely to get approved as a "healthy" food: a Big Mac or a kale Caesar salad? And yet, a Big Mac has 520 calories, 1,140 mg of sodium and 31 g of fat, while the "Keep Calm, Caesar On" had 730 calories, 1,400 mg of sodium and 45 g of fat.

The point here is that it's not an easy call, one way or the other. The legal problem, meanwhile, is that the call is Congress' to make, not Rollins'. And so, Jackson struck down the new rule, and said that if Congress wants there to be limits on SNAP benefits, they can pass a new law that spells out those limits. Jackson is, like Sooknanan, a Democratic appointee (Barack Obama, in this case). And Jackson is, like Sookanan, a woman. So, you can bet they will both be targets of some Trump/Blanche vitriol.

This administration loses in court so often because its actions are so often lawless, its claims are so often meritless, and its employees are so often clueless. And though there isn't that much room for things to get worse, the Trump win rate nonetheless figures to drop even lower in the next couple of years. CNN did a deep dive and found 77 rulings in which dozens of judges appointed by presidents of both parties had unprecedentedly sharp criticism of this administration, using phrases like "retaliatory," "misleading," "irrational," "squalid" and "shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."

This has been a theme of the pieces (L) has written for this site (though L is on vacation, so you're stuck with Z on the legal beat today). And the problem is that if federal judges do not trust the DoJ to play things fair, and to honor their duty as officers of the court, then those judges will take an extra-careful look at Trump administration cases, and will not give the White House the benefit of the doubt.

That is not going to make things any easier for an administration that, again, is already blessed with an abundance of lawless actions, meritless claims and clueless employees. And then, on top of that, consider that Trump has gotten increasingly more angry and unhinged, and figures to continue down that path. So, we're looking at a combination of increasingly skeptical judges AND increasingly worthless court filings. This just can't end well for the administration. After all, the Supreme Court can't rescue Trump every time.

Just in case proof of concept is needed, there were two stories yesterday about potentially dubious legal claims the administration ostensibly plans to pursue. First, U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, Jeanine Pirro has announced that anyone caught vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool will be prosecuted. Of course, that has always been true. The implication is that Pirro is specifically focused on the people allegedly responsible for the peeling blue paint and the algal bloom. Five people have been arrested, though they all deny engaging in vandalism. We'll see if Pirro is serious, or if she's just pandering to the boss. If she is serious, we'll see if she can prove her cases beyond a reasonable doubt. For our part, we doubt it.

Second, Trump himself wants Reflecting Pool justice visited upon ABC. He got on his divorced-from-reality social media platform and fired off this:

In describing the Vandalism that took place at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., ABC FAKE NEWS, one of the worst in the business, even paying me $16,000,000 for past bad and inaccurate reporting, failed to report that their close "friends," Dumocrats Obama and Biden, spent over 100 Million Dollars on the Reflecting Pool, and it never worked. In fact, it was rarely open due to leaks and "stench." They wanted to spend 300 to 400 Million Dollars, but just let it ROT. I spent approximately 16 Million Dollars, and it came out great, except for the Vandalism, which we are now fixing. It was also a much bigger job than originally envisioned, including the outer areas and sidewalks. We are preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting. I like their money, which will be given to the U.S. Treasury! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT

You don't need us to tell you that there's no such legal claim as "false reporting." If there was, everyone at Fox would be on death row right now. Either Trump just wants to feel like he's punishing someone, or he really thinks ABC will offer up another fat bribe settlement. If so, the people who own ABC have presumably learned that there is no amount of money that will ever keep Trump off their backs, and so they are better off fighting. Further, the merger whose skids were being greased with the original $16 million is now complete, and there's no further need for skid-greasing. So, while Trump will undoubtedly find some lackey to file the lawsuit, if that's what he really wants to do, he's not likely to be able to shake the network down again, and he's going to get laughed out of court if it ever reaches that point. (Z)

...And Yet, Trump Says There Are No Limits to His Power

Donald Trump and his administration just keep losing in court (see above). And yet, in an interview with Axios' Marc Caputo this weekend, the President said there are no limits on his power.

Actually, the Constitution spells out in some detail what his powers are, but we appear to be in a post-Constitution era now. He also claimed that the U.S. defeated Iran and that the MOU was an unconditional surrender. The latter point is probably true, but not quite in the way Trump meant it.

Sources report that privately, Trump understands that global oil supplies were running short and if the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed much longer, that could cause a global depression. He didn't mention it, but everyone knows that it would be called the Trump Depression and would be the biggest and most powerful depression ever. People would remember it for 1,000 years.

Still, many people are not comfortable with Trump saying there are no limits to his power. That was the view of George III and the colonists didn't like that very much. There is a holiday early next month that is related to their not liking it very much. It seems that 250 years later, we are back where we started.

Trump appears to understand that things are not really going so well in Iran and wants to change the channel. One way to do that would be to start another war somewhere else and win it quickly. In that way, the new war would push the old war off the front pages. Problem solved!

In the interview, Caputo lobbed a softball at Trump and asked him if he thought an invasion of Cuba would go as smoothly as the one of Venezuela. Trump said: "Possibly. It's possible." Cuba is vastly smaller and weaker than Iran and is on the brink of starvation due to the ongoing U.S. embargo and blockade of the island. Trump showed his knowledge of geography, telling Caputo how Venezuela and Cuba differ from Iran. He said: "These places are close by. Whereas if you look at Iran, that's a very long trip. You know, I flew to that area a few times and unrelated to this, but you're flying for 18 hours, you're flying for a long time. Venezuela is relatively close and Cuba is a hopscotch."

In addition those two countries have smaller populations and no Shahed drones. Cuba once had a strong military, but it has withered after the Soviet Union fell and Russia lost interest in it. So it is indeed possible Trump may soon order an invasion of Cuba to distract from Iran, which he attacked to distract from Jeffrey Epstein. (V)

Trump Approval Keeps Sinking

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has Donald Trump's approval at 36% and his disapproval at 62%, for a net -26%. This is close to his low for Trump v2.0. Here is his Reuters/Ipsos approval rating for each term along with Joe Biden's:

Broken down by race and ethnicity, Trump's approval is 44% with white voters, 27% with Latino voters, and 9% with Black voters. It looks like most of the Latino and Black voters who backed him in 2024 have changed their minds. He is at 40% with non-college voters and 30% with college-educated voters. With men it is 39% and with women it is 33%. On the all-important economy, Trump's approval is now 30%. On the cost of living, he is net -45. And this poll is pretty much in line with most other Trump approval polls right now; excepting the one poll we don't trust that has him at 30%, pretty much everyone else has him somewhere between 35% and 40% approval. None of this is encouraging for Republicans.

Perhaps a better way to look at things, however, is by state. Civiqs has crunched the numbers and put together this map:

Here is the list of the 15 states where Trump is not underwater at the moment:

1. Wyoming: +24 points
2. Idaho: +16
3. Montana: +8
4. South Dakota: +12
5. North Dakota: +19
6. Kansas: +6
7. Oklahoma: +13
8. Arkansas: +8
9. Tennessee: +8
10. Mississippi: +2
11. Alabama: +13
12. West Virginia: +15
13. Indiana: +1
14. Utah: +1
15. Kentucky: EVEN

That is not a very good list. And note how poorly he is doing in the red states with the highest percentage of Black voters, namely Mississippi (+2) and South Carolina (-5). Clearly, Black voters are not happy. If they show up to the polls in force in November, that would be a big step toward a blue tsunami.

And now, a different list. Here is Trump's approval in the 13 states that have competitive Senate races this year (per Sabato's Crystal Ball):

1. Minnesota (Likely D): -26
2. Georgia (Lean D): -22
3. New Hampshire (Lean D): -30
4. North Carolina (Lean D): -13
5. Alaska (Tossup): -3
6. Maine (Tossup): -30
7. Michigan (Tossup): -19
8. Ohio (Tossup): -13
9. Iowa (Lean R): -12
10. Texas (Lean R): -13
11. Florida (Likely R): -11
12. Montana (Likely R): +8
13. Nebraska (Likely R): -4

This must have NRSC Chair Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and his colleagues going through antacid by the truckload. Trump is only above water in one of the 13 states, and he's only close to the "surface" in another two. If the blue team can win all the states where Trump is double-digit unpopular—and midterms are usually a referendum on the incumbent administration—then they would pick up 6 seats, and commanding control of the Senate. That is not probable, but it does mean that to hold the Senate, the GOP would need to hold onto at least three states where Trump is double-digit underwater, while also not losing the competitive races in Alaska and Nebraska. That's a pretty tall order. (V & Z)

Political Bytes, Local Edition: Maryland, New York and Utah

As we noted yesterday, there are primaries today in New York, Maryland and Utah. Readers have written in with a few useful insights about each state:

E.F. in Baltimore, MD: Yes, Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) is a shoo-in for reelection. More interesting to me is the transformation of our local news landscape. The traditionally Democrat-friendly Baltimore Sun has been purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting CEO David Smith, who has turned it into Fox Lite, with an anti-Moore headline 7 days a week.

Apparently, Moore may have exaggerated his military credentials, many years ago. Yup, Real Amurricans could never vote for someone like that. They prefer Cadet Bone Spurs.

Oh, and there's a couple of local races for county government. Unclear which real estate developer's going to get his lapdog elected county exec. Baltimore County hasn't changed very much since Spiro Agnew was in charge. And a state senator currently under federal indictment for blackmailing a former staffer with a sex tape is going to be reelected. It's OK, her brother is a real estate developer.

Our Take: Which state has the longest and deepest history of political corruption? Could be Illinois, but if not, then it's almost certainly a mid-Atlantic state—New York, New Jersey or Maryland. Or one of the Deep Southern states, we suppose. And yet, J.D. Vance is focused on "corruption" in Minnesota and California. Those two states are actually amateurs on the corruption front.

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E.B. in Germantown, MD: I was surprised that you called Rep. Steny Hoyer's (D-MD) MD-05 "the only interesting House race" in Maryland. Here in MD-06 we are absolutely bombarded with ads for former Rep. David Trone (D) vs. Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-MD). Trone is trying to recapture his former seat after giving it up last time in order to run in the Senate primary, which he lost in spectacular fashion despite his massive spending. To me it seems completely unnecessary and egotistical to attempt to knock down a perfectly fine Democrat in order to get your old job back. We shall see if he flames out again, like he did in the 2024 primary against Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD).

Our Take: We would guess the anti-rich-politician vote would decide this one, if not for the fact that even the "poorer" candidate is worth $100 million. Plutocracy, anyone?

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P.O. in New York City, NY: I'm a resident of the hotly contested NY-12 congressional district. Some things I've observed in the run-up to tomorrow's election:

• Assemblyman Alex Bores (D) has been very present in the district. I started getting mailers from his campaign and, more interestingly, started getting negative ads, texts, and flyers calling out his former work at Palantir as early as January. Bores was already quite visible in the district, as it's also his state assembly district. He shows up regularly at local events, speaks at 5th grade graduation ceremonies and such. In keeping with that, he's had very consistent ground-game presence, with canvassing teams roaming the neighborhood, distributing fliers, door knocking and the like.
  
  
• Assemblyman Micah Lasher (D) wasn't out campaigning early as Bores, but has ramped up in the last couple of months. He's clearly the establishment candidate (with ads featuring Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-NY; Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, etc.). He has some presence (I'll often see signs for both him and Bores in the local bodegas), but seems to be relying on digital media like YouTube, along with television ads during the World Cup. My son has asked me about him since he sees so many of his ads on YouTube, if that's any indication.
  
  
• George Conway (D?) has had some, but not much, presence. I've run into his canvassers collecting signatures (I may or may not have called him a "carpetbagger" when they asked for my signature). I see the occasional web/YouTube ad but not much in terms of signage.
  
  
• Jack Schlossberg (D)... Who? I've seen some signage, and maybe one canvasser near an early voting site, but not much beyond that. A New York Times article from a while back said he was phoning in the campaign and that rings true. The neighborhood has enough young people that his last name and grandfather won't carry him to Congress.

Our Take: We've seen this called "the most inauthentic" and "most uninspiring" primary in America. That tracks.

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R.H.D. in Webster, NY: There is a barnburner primary today on both sides in my state Assembly district, the 130th. This is a red district that includes all of Wayne Country, along with my hometown of Webster, which was attached like a panhandle. That's what strange redistricting will do. The incumbent decided not to run again.

I'm a registered independent, and only party members can vote in the primary, so I will wait until November. But I live with my elderly father and he's a registered Republican. So we've been getting lots of mailings from all three GOP candidates, and it's been interesting.

The mailings tout their conservative credentials and how they will stand up to the Democratic majority in Albany. One of the three candidates is from here in Webster, is a career politician, and wants to get back to the Assembly. Oh, he's in his 70s and has called for term limits. Odd choice. The other two are from Wayne County, I've never heard of either. They're younger. One is clearly MAGA and has implied that he has Trump's endorsement. The other is endorsed by the current assemblyman. These two have been at each other, attacking the other's characters and even using AI. It's a sight to see the red team tear each other apart.

The Democratic side has two candidates who will serve as the sacrificial lamb in November, even if there is a blue wave. One, whom I know, lives here in Webster. He's retired from the military, does a lot of civic work, and chairs two town Democratic committees. I'll probably vote for him in the general.

It'll be interesting to see if the Republicans will unite after this primary, or stay divided. This could serve as a microcosm of the Trumplican Party as a whole.

Our Take: Pennsyltucky is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Kentucky between them. Maybe we should start calling it New Yorkalina—a triangle formed by Buffalo, Albany and NYC with South Carolina in the middle.

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M.H. in Salt Lake City, UT: After many years of litigation and opposition by the Utah State Legislature, we now have a fair (Democratic) congressional district (UT-01) in Salt Lake County.

Four Democratic candidates are running for this district that Kamala Harris won by over 20 points. The frontrunner is Ben McAdams, a former state legislator, Salt Lake County mayor, and one-term U.S. Congressman who, in 2019, voted to impeach Donald Trump. He claims he lost his seat over that vote. He is the establishment favorite.

The other three candidates will split the progressive vote and hand the seat to McAdams. Nate Blouin is a current state senator who received Bernie Sanders' endorsement. He has been the most vocal opponent of McAdams, repeatedly pointing out the latter's support from the health insurance industry and other sources that are anathema to progressive causes.

Michael Farrell is a tax attorney whose chief platform is "tax the rich." He is not gaining much traction, but his policy ideas are very progressive.

The rising star is Liban Mohammed, the 27-year-old son of Somali immigrants. He is Muslim, but UT-01 is not as heavily LDS as the rest of the state. He worked in Big Tech. He is very articulate, and he won the support of the majority of delegates at the State Democratic Convention in April.

Mohammed and Blouin will receive the majority of the progressive vote, but McAdams will win. The unopposed Republican candidate, Riley Owen, is relatively unknown. The Democrat who wins today will most likely represent the new Utah district.

Our Take: McAdams is an LDS Church member, the other three apparently are not. Hard to win elections in Utah if you're not LDS.

Thanks to everyone who sent in reports this week. If you have insight into a local election—House, Senate, governor, state legislature, etc.—please do let us know at comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with subject line "All Politics Is Local." (Z)

Starmer Will Stand Down

Yesterday, in a development predictable enough that even Donald Trump saw it coming, British PM Keir Starmer announced that he will resign his post. If newly-minted MP Andy Burnham is the only candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party, then Starmer will leave office on July 16. If there is an actual leadership contest, the PM will stay on until September. Either way, his tenure will end up being a little more than 2 years—longer than a head of lettuce lasts, but not great. Meanwhile, the U.K. will move on to its seventh PM in just over 10 years (David Cameron, the first of those seven, left office on July 13, 2016).

Reader R.O. in Manchester, England, UK has sent us a breakdown of how it went so wrong for Starmer:

Keir Starmer finally bowed to the inevitable on Monday morning and announced that he was stepping down as Prime Minister, scheduling the start of the leadership contest for the 9th of July. The fact that this means he can attend the NATO conference on the 7th (the one part of his job he actually seems to both enjoy and is good at) is surely a complete coincidence.

Ultimately, Starmer's tenure is likely to be remembered as a staggering failure of party management. He has a huge majority in the House of Commons, and no need to go back to the electorate until 2029. The only people who can remove him at the moment are the 400-odd Labour MPs, and so all he really had to do was ensure that they remained happy enough with his leadership not to usurp him. This is not overly challenging, as any coup requires 20% of sitting MPs—around 81—to back it, and would then need to defeat him with the Labour membership, who are generally very loyal to their leaders. But Starmer has antagonized these two groups more than any leader since 1931, when Ramsey MacDonald literally left the party to govern with the Conservatives during the Great Depression.

For many years, the British Labour party has broadly consisted of three wings—referred to as the right, the soft-left and the hard-left—and the major challenge of any Labour leader is in keeping all three wings united. The right is the smallest group, but promotes itself as "the grown-ups in the room" and are probably most closely analogous to the U.S. Democrats; the hard-left is also quite small but favors Scandinavian-style social democratic policies; while the bulk of the party are in the soft-left, who sit on a spectrum between the other two factions. Every leader emerges from one wing, but the art of balancing the interests of all three is the difference between a party that can govern effectively, and one which collapses into an embarrassing public civil war. Even the extremely right Tony Blair understood that you wanted hard-left Jeremy Corbyn inside the party, even if he voted against it 50% of the time, rather than outside voting against it 100% of the time.

Starmer has utterly failed in this task. From the start, his leadership was dedicated to a strategy generally referred to as "punch left"—banish the hard-left of the party and marginalize the soft-left, while empowering the right and adopting right-wing rhetoric to appeal to Conservative voters. A common complaint from his MPs has been that it's not just that Starmer doesn't listen to them—he doesn't even talk to them. Disloyalty is punished with immediate expulsion or suspension. Disciplinary action is slow-walked to drag out suspensions for non-right MPs, while improper behavior for the right is either brushed under the carpet or outright ignored—perhaps most obviously in the nomination of right-wing darling Peter Mandelson for the U.S. ambassador role, despite his extremely cozy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein having been public knowledge since 2009. And threats to Starmer himself were crushed or kept away from power; Andy Burnham, who is likely to be Prime Minister by July 17, was prevented in standing for Parliament precisely because Starmer saw him as a threat.

Electorally, this has proven to be a catastrophic error in judgment; hard-left figures who have been kicked out of the party have successfully stood against Labour challengers for their seats or jumped ship to the Greens, while the right-friendly rhetoric has completely failed to attract any anti-immigrant voters, who think it's disingenuous and would rather vote for the authentic racism of the Reform Party. Labour have cratered in the polls and took staggering losses in the local elections last month. But even this would not be a problem for most leaders. Every government takes losses in the locals, and even hugely successful PMs like Tony Blair or Harold Wilson had similar punishing council election results in their time.

The issue is that Starmer's open contempt for the majority of his own party has left him with no one to come out in support of him. Where Wilson or Blair could rely on figures from all three wings to come out after a defeat and rally the troops, holding their coalition together, Starmer has no friends left to do so. The soft-left dislike him, the hard-left are actively standing against him, and the right of the party immediately betrayed him and attempted a coup on behalf of their actual favored son, Wes Streeting (a coup that failed because Streeting could not even muster the 81 nominations, showing just how small the right really are).

And so, despite having the second-largest majority of any Labour prime minister in history, Starmer has become the shortest-serving, and the first to be overthrown by his own party. His will be a cautionary tale for what happens when a British leader becomes over-reliant on one wing of the party to the exclusion of the others.

Thanks, R.O.!

We are, of course, interested in the nuts and bolts of this situation, and understanding the tactical mistakes that Starmer made. That said, given our focus on American politics, we are even more interested in the meaning of a generally stable democracy like the U.K. having seven different leaders in just over a decade. Sometimes, that nation goes through 3-4 PMs in relatively short order, due to death or political instability or the like. But seven in 10 years is unprecedented, especially for a country that had just five PMs in the 37 years between 1979 and 2016.

Clearly, as we have pointed out, we are in a "throw the bums out" era right now, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Nations around the world (with, admittedly, a few exceptions) are throwing leaders out about as quickly as they can, often shifting from one end of the political spectrum to the other. But why?

That is a really difficult question to answer, especially without the benefit of hindsight. If we knew when this period of throwing the bums out came to an end, who ended it, and how, then we'd have a much better basis for conclusions. But we know none of those things right now. So, all we can do is guess. And this is our best shot at trying to untangle what's going on.

First, the world is clearly in a period of intense change. There's all the technology, from social media to streaming video to AI. There's climate change. There's large-scale immigration. There are new ideas about race and, in particular, gender. Change is hard for many people, and societies usually tend to respond poorly to it, particularly when it is so much, so fast. This is something of a herd mentality thing, and not so easy for leaders to tame or channel.

Second, the world is increasingly interconnected. Globalized, they call it. That means more immigration pressure, to start. It also means that regional wars (Ukraine, Israel) tend to drag half the world in, on some level. But maybe most important, it's hard enough for a leader to change course for the ship of state when that state is operating independently. Given all the interconnectedness today, it's gotta be several orders of magnitude harder to effect meaningful change.

Third, the global economy is pretty strong, and largely has been for 10+ years. And yet, so much of what drives politics these days is economic discontent. The 10 years of revolving PMs coincides exactly with Brexit, which began with a Conservative-sponsored referendum on continued EU membership that was held on June 23, 2016. And that period coincides almost exactly with Trumpism, as well.

The only way to reconcile the strength of the economy with the economic discontent of so many people is wealth inequality. At the height of the Gilded Age in the U.S., a period that also featured much social upheaval and frequent changes of leadership, the top 1% held about 31.4% of the wealth. That figure declined through the 1980s or so (ahem, the Reagan presidency), at which point it began trending upward again. Today, according to the Federal Reserve, the top 1% hold... 31.6%. There is little question that such concentration of wealth is very bad for society as a whole. But it's not so easy for a leader to cause the Elon Musks of the world to give up their trillions, either willingly or not-so-willingly.

Turning back to the Brits for a moment, let's share a letter from another British reader, V.W. in Wilts, England, UK:

It's all very well to get rid of Sir Keir Starmer on the basis he has the charisma of a mouldy dishcloth. But I've yet to hear what Andy Burnham (if indeed, it is to be he):

1. Should do differently, or
2. Intends to do differently, or
3. Could do differently within the strictures of: (a) the public finances and (b) the same Labour caucus facing Starmer, not to mention (c) Russian aggression, (d) an energy crisis and (e) a lunatic in the White House.

The country's problems will not be fixed simply with a Northern accent and a different pair of spectacles.

Whether it's the U.K. or the U.S. or France or Germany or Brazil or any of the other nations who have soured on their leaders, we think #3 is really the key. There are so many constraints right now, changing leadership tends to amount to putting lipstick on a pig. Who knows when the dam will break; the only thing we can really add is that the original Progressive Era was a global phenomenon, and the next era of reform likely will be, too. (Z)

Never Forget: P.O.W. Wow

Up today is D.C. in Hofheim, Germany:

In the summer of 1968, after I had graduated from college and at the height of the Vietnam War, I was drafted into the Army. After my basic and advanced training, though, I was very fortunate and happy to be sent to Germany instead, where I was ultimately stationed with an intelligence unit in Bad Hersfeld near the East German border. While there, I was astonished to get to know any number of older German men who had been prisoners-of-war at various locations in the United States during World War II, inasmuch as I had never been aware that there had been any foreign POWs in the U.S. during the war. And one of these was my eventual father-in-law. He had been stationed with the Wehrmacht along the Atlantic coast of France, where he and his comrades had been trapped by the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy, ultimately taken prisoner, and then sent in troop transport ships to New York, where they were loaded onto a train for their ultimate destination in Missouri. He told two stories about his time as a prisoner of war.

First, during their first day out of New York on the train, two young American soldiers came through their car and told them to put all their personal jewelry, watches, wedding bands, other rings, and the like into a sack that they carried. My father-in-law said that he and the others were not pleased by this treatment, but figured that it was just part of being a prisoner-of-war. But they were both surprised and very impressed when the next day, an American captain came to their car, returned their possessions, and apologized profusely for the behavior of his men.

Then, after reaching their POW camp in Missouri, my father-in-law and another POW were one day ordered to accompany a guard in a flatbed truck up to the train station in Independence to pick up sacks of flour for the camp. They rode on the back of the truck, while the guard drove the truck with a loaded shotgun next to him in the cab. After the 2-hour trip, the guard left them at the station to load the sacks onto the truck and said that he would be back when they were done. They finished loading the sacks of flour, but when the guard finally returned he was drunk as a lord and could barely stand, much less drive, so they loaded him atop the sacks of flour on the back of the truck to sleep it off, while one of them drove and the other held the shotgun on the way back to the camp. When they were almost in sight of the camp, they stopped and woke up the guard so he could drive the rest of the way, and they took his place on the back of the truck.

Having been raised on Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and similar fare, I asked him if they ever tried to escape. He just laughed. They were in the middle of nowhere. Where would they go? How would they get there? And besides, none of them had any particular desire to get back in the war.

Second, after the war, he was brought back on another troop ship to a holding camp in France, from where he was finally released to return to Germany. He began making his way east across Germany toward Silesia, where he was originally from, but Silesia had become a part of Poland, and eastern Germany was under Soviet control, so he stopped when he got as far as Bad Hersfeld, and started a new life there.

A few years later, after I had gotten out of the Army and gone to law school, I went back into the Army as a legal officer in order to be able return to Germany with my wife. I was ultimately stationed at the JAG Office of the VII Corps Headquarters in Stuttgart as a legal liaison officer to the German legal authorities. Not long after I arrived, we hosted a day-long legal conference to discuss mutual legal problems and issues and invited representatives from all the German public prosecutors' offices in our area of responsibility, which included most of southern Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Although we only regularly dealt with a handful of these, we got a very broad turnout of public prosecutors, and at the luncheon we had, I was seated at a large, round table with a dozen or so of these. At some point, the conversation turned to the fact that several of these had been prisoners of war at different places in the U.S. during the war, and that they had in fact begun their legal training there: Lawyers among the POWs in the camps organized and taught courses in German law there, and after the war, when they continued their legal education at regular German universities, they were given credit for the instruction they received in the camps. It was my turn to be surprised and impressed.

Thanks, D.C. (Z)

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