In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent reflects on September 11. Plus: the stupidity of the “Trump Dividend” and the threat of AI.
Anti-war demonstrators hold hands at Union Square in New York City 11 September 2002 during a candle light vigil.
(Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)
This newsletter is going to hit your inbox on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which means you’re no doubt being flooded with remembrances and retrospectives.
And regrets. The country’s response to the worst terror attack in our history was to launch a global war of hysteria that consisted of rage-bombing two countries, destabilizing an entire region, and seeding a police state that has now been fully weaponized by an authoritarian regime against its own citizens. Moreover, every post-9/11 mistake we’ve made has been understood as a mistake in real time—not by all, or even most, people in this country, but by enough that nobody can credibly claim to have been unaware of the dangers.
But the majority of Americans were always going to want to respond to violence with more, overwhelming violence. The majority of people were always going to be willing to trade a little bit of liberty (especially liberty of people perceived as Other) for a little bit of (false) security.
On 9/11, I always think about what might have been. What if, instead of making war on countries that didn’t attack us, we had made the lives of the people living in those places better? What if we had raised their standard of living, instead of bombing their standard of living? What if President George W. Bush had committed our country to using renewable energy instead of starting a war for oil? What if New York City had built Freedom Apartment Buildings instead of the Freedom Tower?
9/11 was a tragedy, but it was also an opportunity to show the world what we really valued and cared about. I guess… we did.
The Bad and the Ugly
Current Issue
- The battle over Missouri’s attempt to radically change its congressional maps to favor the GOP in the midterms—which start in [checks notes] two months—appears to be over. The Supreme Court rejected yet another appeal from state Republicans to change the maps, and the Missouri secretary of state—facing a contempt charge from the Missouri State Supreme Court—finally agreed to follow the law.
- We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump and the US Postal Service will be allowed to rig the midterms by restricting mail-in voting. But all the briefs have been filed, so we can expect the court to rule soon on how the freaking election is supposed to be administered. Wonderful system we’ve got here.
- If I still had time to worry about actual legal issues (as opposed to Trump and the GOP’s extralegal election rigging), I would be super interested in the question of whether senior citizens should be allowed to vote by mail while others are not. As Adam Liptak explains in The New York Times, the question—which is at the heart of a recent Fourth Circuit ruling—runs smack into the constitutional heart of the rarely cited 26th Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote on account of age to anybody 18 years or older. Arguably, allowing seniors to vote by mail but not allowing others to do the same is a violation of the 26th. However, since making it easier for seniors to vote but harder for everyone else helps the Republican Party, I have to assume the Supreme Court will ignore this aspect of the amendment.
- The Trump administration has officially proposed its new rules for the 2030 census. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how these rules were being designed both to help Republicans by undercounting minority populations and to stop people from being able to prove racial discrimination in voting.
- Having failed to stop Trump’s ballroom, people are now suing to stop the president from building his stupid arch in DC. I will say once again that anything built by the Trump administration must immediately be torn down by the next Democrat to hold the White House as part of their first 100-days program. Knocking these things down should pay for itself, because I know there are a lot of people like me who would pay the government for the opportunity to take a few whacks with a sledgehammer at this stuff.
Inspired Takes
- Maria Bartiromo was fired for double-crossing her alleged boss, Rupert Murdoch, to help her real boss, Donald Trump. In The Nation, Jeet Heer explains that she should have been fired much earlier.
- I really enjoyed this piece in The Nation from Joseph Burney about how UC Berkeley is essentially the cause of and solution to all our tech-bro problems.
- Occasionally, I need to be reminded that violent revolution won’t solve any of our problems. I know from history that going all Luigi Mangione only sounds good until the next strongman promises peace and security to the masses with the use of Madame la Guillotine. But sometimes I just want somebody to start the Rebel Alliance already. On Liberal Currents, Alan Elrod does the unpopular work of reminding people that real life is not like the movies, and that the authoritarians and would-be despots are almost always the ones who benefit from chaos.
Worst Argument of the Week
Donald Trump is promising to give every American adult $5,000 if Republicans win the House and Senate in the midterms. He’s calling it a “dividend” because the economy is doing so well. This idea is so fucking stupid I scarcely know where to begin.
- The president, as I’m constantly required to remind people both in the media and on the Supreme Court, cannot spend money unless it is authorized by Congress. Congress would have to appropriate the funds for this “dividend.”
- Giving every American adult $5,000 would cost around $1.2 trillion, which is roughly the yearly budget of the entire US military. So when Trump says this, don’t think “Oh, $5,000.” Think “Oh, so we’re just gonna build a second military.”
- Injecting $1.2 trillion into the economy would cause immediate inflation. Around an extra 1.5 percent, according to experts.
- Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House RIGHT NOW. Just give us the money right now if you’re going to do it, you lying sack of shit. If you won’t do it now, why would I believe you’ll do it later, after the election, when you are (technically) a lame-duck president who (arguably) won’t even have the kind of pull over your party you’ll need to pass it? After the midterms, the only person who can (falsely) promise me $5,000 bucks is JD Vance.
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Catherine Rampell was first over the line on my feed. She detailed a bunch of other times Trump promised to give people money and then never followed through: the $5,000 we were supposed to get from DOGE, the $2,000 we were supposed to get from tariffs, the $1,000 we were supposed to get from expiring ACA subsidies.
Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz followed by pointing out that this latest false promise is not a “bribe.” Not in the illegal sense of the word. Technically, it’s a policy proposal.
He’s right. It’s a stupid, ruinous, unworkable policy proposal. But what really angers me, as a progressive, is that people in the establishment media constantly claim that my preferred policies amount to giving people “free stuff” in exchange for their vote. When I argue for housing subsidies or food programs or healthcare or childcare, all I hear is, “How are you going to pay for it?” or “All those people are just takers” who want “free stuff” instead of “hard work.”
But now this orange asshole is out there offering free money if he wins, and somehow this is an acceptable Republican policy? Bite me.
If the Democrats were smart, their official response to this $5,000 dividend proposal would be “Universal Basic Income now or GTFO.”
In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos
I forced my 13-year-old to take in all the tweets and interviews I could find from Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic whistleblower who gave voice this week to the extinction-level threat posed by AI. I wanted him to fully appreciate this threat.
Instead he laughed it off: “So does this mean I don’t have to go back to school, since I’m not going to make it to my 30s?” I corrected him that he wouldn’t make it to his 20s, and he snickered, “Proving my point.” As I searched for a comeback, I realized the folly of my endeavor: What did I expect him to take away from all this? What did I even want him to take away from it? If he had fully grasped what this man was saying, he would have been filled with existential dread. I was essentially telling a child that a robot was going to come by his house and murder him and his whole family at some unknown point in the near future. What was he supposed to do with that information? Indeed, if what Coxon is telling us is true, “Why do I have to go to school?” is a rational response.
My child has the same three choices the rest of us do: hedonism, paralysis, or denial. The early returns suggest that most people are going with option three: denial. People are saying that Coxon is exaggerating, or it won’t be that soon, or that rational self-preservation will kick in before it’s too late. Personally, I’m more in a state of paralysis: I believe Coxon, but I feel utterly powerless to do anything about it. I mean, I can’t even get the Democratic Party to add seats to the Supreme Court as that court engineers the party’s political extinction. I don’t think my powers of persuasion are going to work on Silicon Valley tech bros designing superintelligences so they can make themselves more money.
And hedonism is really only a practical option for the very rich. For everybody else, the penalties for mistiming the end are too great. The difference between AI killing us in 2030 or 2050 is insignificant on the scale of existence, but it’s massive in terms of how long one must live with the downside of cashing out your 401(k) early to embrace a lifestyle full of Eyes Wide Shut sex parties and blow.
I can only comfort myself with this: In every society, at literally every point in human history, there have been a minority of people who truly believe they are living through the last act of their society. There are always people who think they’re living during the “end times,” and those people are almost always wrong.
And when they’ve been right… well, there was nothing those true believers could have done about it anyway, because the mistakes that caused the end were made generations earlier. If this is truly our end, all we can really do is be kind to one another, and do what we can to minimize the suffering.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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