It may be more symbolic than substantive change, but Donald Trump’s order designating English as the official national language is a mean-spirited political slap. As he made clear in his address to Congress, Trump sees English-only as another anti-immigrant cultural weapon.

It is unlikely to bring about either “unity” or an effective change in how we speak to each other. After all, more than 30 states already have done the same, and yet Trump feels it necessary to issue a national order carrying the force of law.

For openers, Trump provides nothing to make the idea work, like underwriting classes and making it an invitation to learning. Rather, his approach would be to vanish or deport those who don’t speak English.

Practically speaking, it means that government forms and instructions may not require translation in Spanish, Chinese or other languages where citizens, naturalized citizens and residents need information. Airports and hospitals seem to understand the need to do so even if the White House, which has taken down its Spanish language web page, cannot.

The unfunny part of this is that when someone near you is ill, facing an emergency, or in some kind of trouble, your safety or health may depend on whether there are instructions on the wall that the victim can understand immediately. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, that might involve pointing out exit lanes. health information or voting rules in several different tongues.

Requiring English doesn’t mean everyone speaks and reads quickly in English, though Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and immigrant whisperer, thinks it is an important warning to those who would come to these shores.

What Problem Are We Solving?

Other than offending Trump personally, what is the problem at hand?

By contrast, then New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg worked to improve his own Spanish speaking skills when in office, and, successfully or not, many politicisms try to reach voters in their own preferred language. That is not Trump’s style, either with voters or with leaders like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump decided to berate in rapid-fire English while Zelensky was seeking to answer in his thrid spoken language.

For years, there has been an English-only movement that aligns with bilingual education restrictions and tightened immigration. That’s clearly the group that this Trump order wants to reward — a distinct move to underscore a singular viewpoint for a pluralistic America.

The executive order explains that “Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society.” It erases a Bill Clinton rule for agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, though it added no real enforcement actions.

So much for Republican efforts to reach out politically to Spanish-speaking voters. What remains a mystery in issuing such a proclamation is exactly what problem Trump is seeking to solve — other than scoring his anti-immigrant political point?  Were people somehow previously confused that most business transactions and government information are in English?

Instead of firing federal employees by the thousand each week, how about sponsoring more public classes for English for speakers of other languages? My own time volunteering as an English teacher for new arrivals came to a halt in the Trump years because people taking the classes feared immigration roundups rather than a welcoming message — in English.

Backlash to Come

Like other Trump broadsides, as in declaring that there are only two genders or that the Gulf should be named for America, not Mexico, someone will sue, and this issue too will end up in court. In English.

While most of the country speaks some sort of English, there are areas where English is not dominant. You can get by in New York City and El Paso, Texas, just speaking Spanish, for example. In Puerto Rico, an American territory, 94 percent of the population only speaks Spanish.

Americans, at least those who would admire this order, see language as a bar to U.S. unity — or conformity — with the same kind of squishy discomfort that they bring to all questions of diversity, equity and inclusion. But some of us choose to speak more than one language, official or not, and see communication as an avenue towards understanding.

Our grandchildren in South Lake Tahoe have attended a bilingual elementary school where they have become fluent in Spanish as well as English, and they easily were able to communicate with our family members in Argentina, which has its own brand of Spanish language. We have been present for proud primary schoolers at their school who were the first in their family to be able to pass an English proficiency and enhance relationships beyond language alone.  We have a daughter-in-law from Madrid, and all three of our adult children can get by in Spanish. Speaking another language is a plus, not a problem, and so my wife and I work at it daily.

My own weekly conversations to help a Ukrainian woman improve her English for a chance for more international work have expanded to a continuing friendship that this week seems particularly challenged by the same English-only speaking Trump.

Of course, for Trump himself, who has long mocked politicians who answer questions in Spanish, perhaps this is a chance for him to lean to speak English rather than social media sloganeering. Based on reading of any of Trump’s “weaves,” as he calls most of his public speeches, that show thoughts radiating at random and often ending, well, nowhere, Trump could use a brush-up in spelling and grammar as well as in critical thinking.

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The fluttering you are hearing in early March of this year is not the wings of finches and sparrows and chickadees returning to your bird feeder after a long winter away from the cold. It is instead the sound of millions of dollars flying into the pockets of Donald Trump, who Wired magazine reported yesterday is holding so-called “candlelight dinners” for groups at the low low price of $1 million per head. If instead you want a private audience over burned steaks and limp fries with the President of the United States, you have to plunk down 5 million bucks, a tasty opportunity that is being signed up for by “business leaders,” according to Wired.

It's notable that these pay-to-play repasts are not being held in the White House -- which is after all a public building owned by the American taxpayer and not an event space that you can rent out at will -- either because they didn't pass the smell test of the White House Counsel's office or it would be too unseemly even for the loosey-goosey standards of the Trump White House.

Instead, the chummy private dinners are being held at Trump's club/resort/residence in Palm Beach, Mar a Lago. The fluttering bucks are not going directly into the pocket of the renowned grifter and cheapskate, but rather taking a detour into something called MAGA Inc., described by Wired as “a super PAC that supported Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.” What a campaign super PAC is doing still operating in the public sphere after the election is over is unknown. Sources told Wired yesterday that the money is “all going to the library.” If your reaction to that little nugget is Library? What fucking library? you're not alone.

The money Trump rakes in from the suckers who think they're buying access when what they're actually getting is rubber chicken, will pass through the Byzantine accounts of one of the several Trump super PACs that came into being as he planned his return to the Oval Office. He might skim some off as admin charges, or he might make use of the capacious pockets of his sons and daughters he “hired” to work in various capacities in his reelection effort, who then passed their paychecks directly into the Trump Organization. But it's a certainty that a massive quantity of dough he takes in will be charged as rent for space in Mar a Lago, and thence be transmitted directly to Trump himself as sole owner of that garish galump-zone squatting in tattered splendor between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth Lagoon.

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Let’s be clear about one thing upfront: Donald Trump does not personally give a flying fuck about Social Security. He doesn’t want to cancel it because of ideological reasons or because he wants to own the libs. He doesn’t want to destroy this 90-year-old piece of our social safety net because he thinks Those People are getting a free ride or because he hates the poor.1

Donald Trump wants to destroy Social Security because he was ordered to and he’s going to make money from it.

Too cynical? You’re not cynical enough.

Here’s Trump lying last night:

"We're also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program that our seniors and that our seniors, people that we love rely on, believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members, people aged 100 to 109 years old.”

Cool story. Except Trump knows that’s not true.2 The right popped that lie out a few weeks ago and it was immediately nuked from orbit in the most embarrassing way: By actual smart people who know what the fuck they’re talking about.

The explanation is really nerdy and has to do with a very old computer language called COBOL. WIRED has a good story on it and Musk absolutely knows what the fuck COBOL is since he was a programmer nerd in the 80s and 90s. I fucking know what COBOL is and I’m not a programmer at all. I’m just old and remember this crap from the ye olden days.3

And yet, Musk is still repeating the lie and he’s having Trump repeat it (because who do you think is ordering Trump to lie about Social Security?).

That means one thing and one thing only: Trump, under orders from Elon Musk, is coming for Social Security.

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His excuse? Rampant fraud and waste he knows is not actually there. Musk calls it a “Ponzi scheme” which is a talking point the right has used for decades in their crusade to get rid of Social Security. But whereas elected Republicans have occasionally tried to mess with it and were immediately slapped down by their voters, Musk is taking a sledgehammer to Social Security because he’s not an elected official or beholden to the public. Or the rule of law. Just his own drug-fueled mania and warped ideology.

That’s why Musk’s fake government agency DOGE is already firing thousands of employees from the chronically under-staffed SS agency and closing offices all across the country. How close is he to breaking the system? Closer than you think:

The former head of the Social Security Administration warns that proposed cuts to the agency could lead the entire system to “collapse,” disrupting benefits payments to millions of Americans.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse, and there will be an interruption of benefits,” Martin O’Malley, former Social Security commissioner under the Biden administration, told CNBC. “I think that will happen within the next 30 to 90 days.”

“People should start saving now,” he urged.

Republicans love to call Social Security an “entitlement,” giving it a negative connotation. But Americans have been paying into SS their entire adult working life and they are, in fact, entitled to that money.

But in Musk’s technofascist utopia, a social safety net is a problem. People who have a modicum of security are people who cannot be exploited and controlled by their billionaire masters. The idea of collective action to provide a better future is anathema to the Silicon fascists who think government exists to benefit the rich and the rich alone. Everyone else exists to feed the rapacious neverending greed of their overlords. Stability and security only exist when the ruling elite feels like granting it, thus is the population always fearful and obedient. And under control.

Remember, Musk and his billionaire cohort are having Trump engineer a complete collapse of the economy as rapidly as possible. Along with ruinous tariffs, mass unemployment, gutting American healthcare, pulling billions out of the economy all at once, and sabotaging the banking system, what better way to blow up the economy than to throw millions of senior citizens into poverty all at the same time?

The legacy press is being very careful to not connect these dots. They are, in fact, going to great lengths to present them AS dots. Unique. Discreet. Completely unrelated to one another. But that’s not true. They’re not just connected. They’re all the same dot. A malignant cancer eating away at the country with two goals: To implode the economy and render the federal government incapable of responding to said collapse.

And when “nothing can be done” because the government is “broken?” Well, then I guess the private sector will have to step in.

The only way to save Social Security will be to privatize it.

The only way to make air travel safer will be to privatize air traffic control.

The only way to keep Medicare running will be to hand the entire thing over to the healthcare companies.

Of course, all of those burdensome regulations will have to go and, come on, the private sector has to make a profit, doesn’t it? Don’t worry! It’ll be fine! The free market will solve everything.

Oh, and only companies that are personally approved by Elon Musk can compete in the “free market.” Did we forget to mention that?

Trump, of course, will receive a very generous payday and get to play president until he dies. All of his enemies will be destroyed and that’s all he cares about. Musk gets to be King of America, handpicking the next “president” because, well, elections will be nationalized by then.

One wonders, however, what Musk plans to do when millions of MAGA Boomers lose their Social Security in the next couple of months. Does he think they’ll just watch Fox News and blame Joe Biden? Maybe get angry at trans athletes or the migrants mowing their lawns? I think, perhaps, that will not be the case.

I think, perhaps, when the leopards eat their faces, MAGA voters are going to look around at the wreckage of their lives, get really angry, and come for the people who burned it all down. That would be the Republicans they voted for. Republicans were only supposed to hurt Those People and own the libs, not hurt the MAGA faithful. Trump is betraying them. Their new best friend Elon Musk is betraying them.

As malignant narcissists, how will Musk and Trump react when the Republican base turns on them? Badly. The only thing they want from the right is adoration. Without that, they’ll seek to punish them just as much as the rest of us. It’s the nature of broken manchildren to lash out when confronted.

But what could possibly go wrong when tyrants press their boot down on a group of people they’ve trained for years to respond to imaginary tyranny with increasing levels of violence? When confronted with real tyranny directed at them, I’m sure MAGAland will just lay down and roll over. For sure. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

There are 26 days until the first Blue Wave starts in Wisconsin and 243 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

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In the Boston Globe last week, I offered a metaphor from the Cold War, the DefCon scale from 5 to 1, for understanding stages of constitutional crisis, to Anjali Huynh, for her article “‘Fear-mongering’ or emergency? As Trump flexes executive power, here’s what to know about constitutional crises.” (Feb. 27).

A week ago, I suggested we have moved from DefCon 5 (“normal conditions” during the Cold War) to DefCon 4. Maybe we’re getting closer to DefCon 3.

First, I quote Huynh’s helpful summary, along with Professor Kate Shaw’s similar observation about stages. Then I will offer a bit more detail about the other stages with brief historical examples for context.

A constitutional crisis takes place when one of the three branches of the federal government — the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branch — exceeds its powers granted by the Constitution and encroaches on others. That typically takes place by defying court rulings or laws, with limited pushback from the other branches.

In short, a constitutional crisisarises when “you have a crisis that does not get resolved by the rule of law,” said Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor and presidential historian. He noted a crisis can also stem from disputes between the federal government and the states.

The United States has undergone — and survived — several constitutional crises. In 1832, for instance, President Andrew Jackson defied a Supreme Court ruling that Georgia could not seize land belonging to Cherokee nation. Jackson ignored the ruling and ultimately forced thousands of Native Americans to move westward in what has become known as the “Trail of Tears.”

In another instance, Southern states refused to desegregate their public schools after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision instructed them to do so. That prompted President Dwight Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce the law.

Scholars disagree on exactly at what point a government conflict becomes a constitutional crisis. Some believe it occurs when an executive disregards laws set by Congress, for example, while others think a president also needs to defy court rulings. A constitutional crisis doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch, they said. Instead, they exist on a spectrum and can come in stages, with the potential to get worse….

[Professor Kate Shaw of U. of Penn. Law School]: “I don’t think we are beyond the point of no return — and I also don’t think it’s necessarily a binary,” she said. “There is a spectrum, but I do think that wide-scale lawbreaking by one branch of government without really meaningful pushback, in particular from Congress, is the stuff of constitutional crises.“

Shugerman similarly likened the country’s current state to levels of military readiness, saying, “We just moved up from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 4 because we have some mix of negligence, recklessness, or deliberation in not complying with lower court orders.” For instance, a judge admonished the Trump administration on Tuesday for not resuming foreign aid funding after ordering it to do so earlier this month.

Here’s one chart of the DefCon stages from Wiki:

To elaborate on my nuclear war metaphor:

DefCon 5 is not “normal” normal, but “Cold War normal” tension. I’m suggesting that Trump 2016 to 2020 was mostly Defcon 5, like a domestic Cold War level of suspicion and readiness. (But see below for spikes of crisis from the first term.)

Defcon 4 is now: Passive aggressive disobedience of lower courts. Again, what I called “some mix of negligence, recklessness, or deliberation in not complying with lower court orders.”
Defcon 3 is disobeying more openly and deliberately. We are getting close.
Defcon 2 is flagrantly disobeying SCOTUS & extralegal measures (my example of Gov. Orval Faubus Little Rock and Ike sending in the National Guard.
Defcon 1 is full-blown violence beyond riots, but either unchecked federal government violence (the Trail of Tears, 1832), unchecked state violence (the Civil War), or unchecked private violence by insurrection (if January 6th had been much bigger and uncontrolled).

In 2018 to 2021, there were spikes from DefCon 5 to DefCon 4: I’m thinking of the reports that Trump would fire Mueller and others, etc. And DefCon 3 was the Ukriane bribery/extortion phone call and the first Impeachment, and then the January 6th insurrection and second Impeachment. Trump should have been removed and disqualified, but at least a baseline of the rule of law held. On the Ukraine call, executive branch lawyers, inspectors general, and other officers held the line, the House impeached, and the mix of legal institutions temporarily stopped the direct threat.

January 6th was similar: A political riot to overturn a presidential election that overtook the Capitol with some intending to assassinate the Vice President, the Speaker, and anyone else in their way — that is DefCon 3. But law enforcement eventually restored order and the rule of law through legally sanctioned means — maybe too much restraint, and surely at a great personal cost. The pardons four years later do not change the fact that immediate danger was temprorily stopped.

Today’s ruling by the Roberts Court in Dept. of State vs. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy allowed a lower court order to stand, meaning the Trump administration must comply with that court’s order to spend the foreign aid funds as appropriated by Congress – lawfully as actual law. However, the ruling was only 5-4, and the 8-page dissent by Alito was off-the-wall presidentialist fan fiction, with FoxNews red meat about how the majority was hurting taxpayers. Here is how Alito began:

Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic “No,” but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.

Here’s how Alito wrapped up:

Today, the Court makes a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.

This is just not how any of this works. That’s not how legislation works. Congress already lawfully appropriated the money. Courts do not have a constitutional role in second-guessing Congress on behalf of some preferred subset of disgruntled “taxpayers.” The trial judge was merely following the established law of the spending power and appropriations against the president’s attempt to claim “unchecked power” beyond Article II (“lacking jurisdiction,” if you will), and act of executive hubris. And Alito’s dissent is dripping with hubris and alt-law, not real law. But I’ll save that critique for another day.

Here’s my concern about DefCon stages: The audience for this dissent was President Trump and what is on all of our minds: Will Trump comply with court orders? Alito’s raw, simplistic pro-presidential power political rhetoric does not seem aimed his colleagues in the majority. It is not written in a real attempt to persuade lawyers and judges who know the current law of separation of powers and Congress’s spending power. No, the dissent was aimed more broadly: For Fox News viewers, for the right-wing social media echo chambers, and for Trump and his MAGA base to delegitimize the five Justices’ ruling in blunt populist terms. Wittingly or not, Alito is moving the needle towards non-compliance.

And most alarming is that Justice Kavanaugh signed on to it, when he could have dissented silently. Here’s what I wrote this morning immediately when the decision came down:

Here’s what I added:

This is not shocking rhetoric from Alito. He and Thomas know their audience. What’s shocking is Kavanaugh, often assumed to be in the middle block of the 3-3-3 Court, siding with extreme right presidentialist maximalism and anti-legal rhetoric.

The hope here is that Roberts and Barrett understand better today these stakes – after Trump’s deliberate flexing and owning of Roberts in front of the entire world on a live mic — and they understand which side of the separation of powers they stand: with the Founders and their original design of checks and balances against tyranny.

Tonight, Donald Trump will give the first major address to Congress (functionally if not technically a State of the Union address) of his second term. We’re just six weeks in, and this would be a very very very long newsletter if I rattled off every disastrous decision from this administration. But the list includes the gutting of the federal workforce, including firing people who do things like control our nuclear arsenal, maintain our national parks, alert the public about volcanic eruptions, and track the spread of deadly disease. It includes shuttering USAID, which is almost surely going to result in vast immiseration and death, especially of children (a very “pro-life” president we have here). It includes siding with Russia and its imperial ambitions, and abandoning not just Ukraine, and not even just Europe, but the broader post-World-War-II rules-based world order in favor of autocracy and a politics of domination. It includes economically devastating tariffs that have so far succeeded primarily in raising prices and lengthening America’s list of enemies. It includes getting rid of basic rules against corruption and bribery.

I imagine we’re going to hear about all of this, except refashioned into victories. The federal workforce cuts that are only making life worse in the US? Those will be remodeled as cost-cutting and fat-trimming. The tariffs? That’s standing up for the American worker. The abandoning of Ukraine and the kids we’re killing around the world? That’s putting America first.

We know what we’re going to hear. We know it’s going to be a lot of lies. And so the biggest thing I’m looking for at the kinda-sorta State of the Union: Is Trump still with it?

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Donald Trump is 78 years old. Trump’s campaign speeches were rambling, angry, and often incoherent; he picked up a habit of playing DJ and dancing awkwardly around stage as even his die-hard fans filtered out. Now that he’s in power, it seems that his White House is being run by Elon Musk, who has gone from richest man in the world to most powerful and richest man in the world. Trump may be sitting behind the desk, but it’s the unelected and unaccountable Musk who seems to be pulling the levers.

There hasn’t been much coverage of Trump’s faculties because the political press has simply been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of insanity from this presidency. If the mantra of the Obama White House was “don’t do stupid shit,” the Trump White House abides by the war cry of “constantly do crazy shit.” This strategy — Stephen Miller’s “flood the zone” — lets this administration get away with a lot. It also covers up a lot. Like: How is the president doing, mentally and physically?

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I am of the personal opinion that Donald Trump has a serious personality disorder that has nothing to do with his age. But during the campaign it has also seemed that age might be taking its toll on him: That he was slowing down mentally and physically; that he was often confused.

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency was marred by speculation about his cognitive health, and his legacy will carry the stain of the apparent cover-up of his decline. Trump, by contrast, seemed practically vivacious on the debate stage and on the campaign trail. But let’s be real: Trump is also a man showing his age. And if it mattered that Biden was a president in decline (and I believe it did), then it matters if Trump is, too.

One curse of the Biden administration’s basic functionality is that Biden’s age became the big story, because there simply wasn’t anything bigger to cover. Of course there were big stories and devastating decisions from the administration (ahem, Gaza), but no one was blowing up the government or chucking out the basics of democratic governance; there weren’t potentially democracy-ending or world-order-ending changes. And so the focus was on Biden’s acuity.

With Trump, it’s different, because the question of his cognition is far less urgent than the question of whether the United States government still exists, whether an unelected billionaire has access to vast reams of private data belonging to American citizens, or whether the US is going to push the remaining Palestinians out of what little homeland they have left and turn Gaza into a land of Kushner-owned casinos. I can see why “Trump seems cognitively impaired” is not, by comparison, front-page news.

But in a speech where he’s going to lay out a series of falsities about his administration’s acts, style matters as much as substance. He’ll be reading from a teleprompter. He’s had ample time to prepare. This should be an easy performance.

But this is also a man who seems to have Elon Musk and a team from the Heritage Foundation running his White House for him, and who sits back while JD Vance (who?) plays Capo with an actual leader. Sure, those around him are still trying to impress Trump and remain in his favor. But is he actually still in charge? Does he still have the capacity to lead? Those questions might not be answered by a single pre-prepared speech. But his performance tonight will be a window into his abilities, and those deserve a hard look.

xx Jill

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