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Observing events since the 2024 Presidential election and coverage of those events in all types of media makes one point very evident...
...Americans are not grasping the full extent of the risk posed to their rights and very lives as a result of the wholesale gutting of legal and social norms.
Civil Disobedience?
As one example of this failure of language and understanding, consider the coverage of protests against ICE in Los Angeles or the interactions with federal "authorities" experienced by a sitting US Senator or a city comptroller in New York City. Thousands of people have turned out in Los Angeles for over a week to protest commando-style raids by un-uniformed, un-badged and often MASKED people claiming to be "federal agents" on restaurants and hardware stores, claiming to be aimed at rounding up illegal workers. US Senator Alex Padilla, representing the state of California, was treated like an active shooter threat after he had the temerity to ask DHS Secretary Kristi Noem a question during her press conference. Padilla was dragged out, forced to the ground face-down and cuffed DESPITE the fact he was escorted TO this press conference by the same agents who dragged him out, DESPITE the fact the press conference was held inside a federal building that required a security scan prior to entry and DESPITE the fact he had an appointment THAT AFTERNOON to meet with Noem on the federal presence in his state. In NYC, the comptroller was appearing with defendants appearing in federal immigration court, he escorted a defendant out of the courtroom after the judge dismissed the man's case, was accosted by ICE agents attempting to arrest the man on charges related to those just thrown out by the judge, then was ARRESTED when he had the temerity to ask the ICE agents to display a warrant for their arrest of the man.
In "analysis" of these events in the media, some discussions have drawn comparisons between these current struggles and civil disobedience campaigns of the past. Such comparisons are a direct sign that the media and those consuming it are completely failing to understand current events.
America has a long history of civil disobedience being used as a mechanism for bringing about crucial social and legal changes. The key behind the entire philosophy of civil disobedience lies in the very word disobedience. Civil disobedience relies upon citizens publicly violating CURRENT LAWS in order to draw attention to the inherent unfairness / immorality of those laws and to do so in numbers that refute conventional wisdom that only a few want those laws changed.
When the society has laws that require separate bathrooms, separate drinking fountains, separate seating, etc. for people of a particular race or denies protections under the law from people of a certain race, civil disobedience campaigns would focus on explicitly BREAKING those laws and restrictions and peacefully submitting to arrest and possible trial and conviction under current interpretations of the law.
Using civil disobedience successfully to create changes in a corrupt, morally tilted society takes enormous courage and those using such techniques have moved the country forward consistently over the last hundred years. However, civil disobedience has ZERO bearing on current events. The motivations behind current protests are completely distinct from those that would drive civil disobedience. In the current environment, everyday citizens are not breaking the law. They are protesting the actions of elected and appointed officials in government who are breaking the law in ways that violate individual rights. Those involved in these events are LAW ABIDING CITIZENS attempting to exercise their rights to assembly, free speech and, in these cases, execute their role as an elected public official. Those actions are not civil disobedience, they are simply everyday actions of Americans and duties of elected public officials.
Reporters and commentators who describe current events in terms of civil disobedience are obfuscating what is really happening. For those inclined to support crackdowns, a civil disobedience narrative implicitly conveys that protesters ARE breaking some law and that framing serves as justification for ignoring the actual point of the protest rather than possibly learning something from it. For those inclined to support the underlying intent of the protest, linking the protest to "civil disobedience" understates the threats to enforcement of GOOD LAWS which pose threats to every American.
Rights?
Current events coverage also misleads the public in the language used regarding rights and disputes reaching courts. News stories and commentaries that involve debates over rights of citizens often have a patronizing, pseudo-educational tone somewhere between that of a "The More You Know" public service ad on TV and a mind-numbing mandatory training class taught by your HR department at work. These threads might begin with The Trump Administration is arresting and detaining Americans passing through Customs upon return to America from abroad without cause and without a hearing, a clear violation of their rights. As the dispute triggers eventual hearings and a judge orders the detention to end, the media might update the story as In a blow to the Administration, a judge ordered the release of X, citing the government's unlawful detention. The court has helped stop the erosion of American's rights.
This simple ping-pong, back-and-forth coverage doesn't convey what is actually happening.
In a prior world where the law was respected or at least feared, even by people who occasionally broke it accidentally or intentionally, a court order blocking action A against person X would also serve to block the government from taking that same action A against person Y or Z. In post-America, every single head of every single department within the federal government has demonstrated ZERO fealty to written laws and precedents and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT fealty to any whim uttered by Trump. Ditto for the Republicans in the House and Senate who could stop this nonsense in a day but are silent. And these whims can change every day based on whoever was the last, most recent person to talk to Trump about an issue. A ruling from a court means absolutely nothing in this climate.
This lawlessness on the part of the GOVERNING, not the GOVERNED, has crucial implications Americans must understand going forward. It is obviously the case that any tactics adopted by those opposing MAGA insanity cannot assume legal challenges alone – even those resulting in favorable rulings in court – will stop undesired actions from continuing. Losing a battle in court over action A in one jurisdiction has absolutely no bearing on what MAGA adherents in positions of power at federal, state or local levels will do in other jurisdictions. No doesn't mean "no" everywhere, it just means "try to catch me again."
A less obvious implication of this lawlessness must also be understood by individual Americans as they ponder their own activities. Again, in this climate, written rights mean NOTHING in the absence of law enforcement and judicial systems that follow laws and precedents. For individual Americans encountering law enforcement at any level ANYWHERE in the country, the likelihood of a "bad" outcome has arguably risen materially and the possible "floor" of behavior from law enforcement officials has gone down, if for no other reason than the adoption of tactics where officials do not wear uniforms, refuse to show identification and use unmarked vehicles. This makes individual accountability for abuses of power even more difficult to obtain than it is in a world with qualified immunity. This increase in "bad encounter" probabilities will hold even in "left" leaning jurisdictions. There is always the worst 5-10 percent of a force that might have refrained in more strict times from abusing their power but, when signals have been sent from the President that knocking heads is okay and pardons for those knocking the "right" heads are likely, those inhibitions will vanish.
This calculus of decisions about personal actions in the face of opponents who violate the law at will to suit their goals is the REAL topic no one in America is discussing. As discussed earlier, the purpose of civil disobedience is to bring about changes in BAD laws by purposely, systematically VIOLATING those bad laws to trigger awareness and recognition of the need for change. It isn't clear if civil disobedience is remotely appropriate for combating an opponent who feels no obligation to consistently follow or enforce ANY law.
In this climate of lawlessness on the part of those doing the GOVERNING rather than of those being GOVERNED, how long do the governed wait as those doing the governing distort the levers of power to their will? Where is the point of no return? There are zero examples in history where a nation has flirted with fascism or authoritarianism only briefly then bounced back via democratic means to a prior non-authoritarianism state of existence. There's a pretty good reason for that. Authoritarians feel no obligation to obey laws or norms and will do anything to retain and enlarge their power. Democracy only works when all factions attempting to win control still obey the law when they lose and when winning factions protect election integrity to allow future changes in control.
Stated more bluntly, in the face of a lawless opponent who is bent on destroying concepts of precedent and equal protection under the law, how and when do the glove comes off when combating such an opponent? Has that moment already been missed?
Apple in China – Patrick McGee -- 864 pages plus notes and index
Patrick McGee's book, Apple in China, published in May of 2025, provides a comprehensive explanation of how three different forces combined to make Apple one of the largest corporations in the world in terms of market capitalization. The sub-title of the book, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, hints at a darker consequence of Apple's "success" but understates the true impact. The thesis of the book appears early on in the introductory chapter on page 8.
The prevailing Western narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow. The go-to story of the past two decades has been about the tedium of assembling Apple products – a tail of low wages, underage employees, sixteen-hour workdays, suicides at Foxconn, and accusations of forced Uighur labor. This narrative isn't wrong, but it misses the biggest piece of the puzzle: It's not merely that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it's that Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple. (page 8)
McGee's thesis itself is correct as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough. This isn't a strategy China cooked up to capture Apple, this is a strategy China devised and consistently executed from the beginning to acquire manufacturing expertise, foster self-reliance and counter economic threats from industrialized democracies anywhere on the planet. China's strategy and its application are not limited to trendy, high-margin consumer electronics goods. They apply to nearly every segment of industrial manufacturing.
For the most part, McGee's exposition in Apple in China covers events in sequential order focusing on Apple's near-bankruptcy prior to Steve Jobs rejoining the company through to the present. However, considering McGee's insights against the wider picture of industrial competition worldwide, it is worth summarizing the points in the book along the following lines:
Apple's unique history corporate culture
China's peculiar legal and economic federalism
American political and economic arrogance
With background provided in this order, it will become apparent why Apple was simply the first target and uniquely suited for exploitation and uniquely valuable to China's strategy.
Apple's Unique History and Corporate Culture
Apple's operations in China began in 2003 when demand for the original iPod finally grew enough to exhaust capacity at one of its manufacturing outsources in Taiwan and they decided to open a plant in China. By that point, prior management and financial struggles within Apple had laid much of the groundwork for senior leaders to become "addicted" to outsourcing even though it represented a complete reversal of Apple's historical preferences.
The first dynamic unique to Apple and its history and culture could be summarized as Apple's tendency to hire the best, then ignore them.
Since its inception in 1976, Apple created a series of trailblazing products never previously seen in the electronics industry. While each involved "consumer electronics" level technologies, those technologies were evolving so rapidly that each iteration – the personal computer (the Apple ][), affordable laser printers for desktop publishing and graphic design work (the Laserwriter), an intuitive, functional, stylish digital music player (the iPod) and of course the modern smartphone (the iPhone) – all required strategies for supply chain management, manufacturing, assembly, distribution and retailing that were completely "outside the box" of prior generations of expertise.
In each of these iterations, Apple encountered problems meeting demand and responded by hiring people from other companies with backgrounds and track records for innovation in these areas. Nearly to a person, every one of these hires was shocked to find on their start date that no one in the company gave them direction on what the company wanted done or even provided a summary of management's understanding of the problem(s) to be solved. We hired YOU to tell US what we should do! Get busy! The new exec was simply handed the reins and given carte blanche to do whatever they felt was required.
Over its history, Apple's ability to identify and recruit world-class leadership for these firefighting roles at critical points has proven to be nearly infallible. At many crucial points in that history, a new hire would be dropped off amid great technical or financial peril without so much as a map and compass. The new hire would assess the situation, spot a crippling constraint, then synthesize a new design or tactic to solve the problem. At each point, the solution would catch up to the problems, eliminate them and result in predictable operations and financial improvements in six to twelve months and healthy profits afterwards.
Apple leadership in Cupertino did this repeatedly, training executive leaders in design, manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing and regional geopolitics and allowing them to operate within their sphere with virtually no interference or micromanagement whatsoever. As long as they produced the desired numbers, these top leaders had tremendous autonomy.
Curiously however, despite this stable of executives with proven world-class insight into their particular field, Apple leadership in Cupertino would also consistently IGNORE these leaders when they warned of looming problems. These problems might present in several ways. An outsourcing strategy that had scaled for multiple years but was reaching some other uncontrollable upper limit. A strategy for mitigating some political tension with a regional or national government negotiated years prior that had been altered by changes in government leadership. Whatever the trigger, Apple's leadership in Cupertino had a consistent response – as long as a unit was meeting current targets, Cupertino leadership didn't want to hear and often could not understand any lurking problems inside that black box. Senior leadership was thus ignoring some of the best management talent on the planet who were screaming at them ICEBERG!
Curiously, the case can be made that Apple's eventual eagerness to embrace outsourcing stemmed from an original ethos within the company to NOT outsource. That ethos dated back to the Apple ][ computer. Apple's first computer was designed by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak not only had a genius for electronic design and optimization of circuitry, he also understood that success of the product required its packaging to allow owners to easily open the chassis and replace parts at will. This expanded the universe of businesses who would be capable of creating accessories for the device which widened its popularity. Steve Jobs also applied his aesthetic sensibility to the design by ensuring the Apple looked like a family friendly appliance instead of a delicate, scientific lab device but the minimal chip set and open design were the key drivers in the Apple's iconic physical appearance.
Apple wanted to position the Apple ][ as a reliable product and felt the best way to ensure quality was to control the manufacturing of the boards and final assembly in its own factories. As volumes ramped up, Apple evolved the design to consolidate chips to simplify manufacturing and support more automation, allowing it to keep up with growing volume while lowering costs. This strategy remained consistent with Apple through the mid 1990s. For example, the Macintosh Iici made between 1989 and 1993 included a total of 29 chips on the motherboard and the entire chassis could be taken apart by removing two screws. Apple did open factories in Mexico and Ireland but the buildings and equipment remained Apple-owned.
This strategy did result in conflict within the company as Jobs became focused on development of the Macintosh and began insisting on devoting manufacturing capacity to its more complex physical design. However, most of that conflict vanished when Jobs was fired in 1985. From that point through 1997, Apple's overall strategy emphasized "human factors" design much like Jobs insisted but in his absence, that overall strategy always leaned towards manufacturability and ease of assembly in any tie-breaking scenario where choices had to be made.
When Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, Apple was near bankruptcy and the Macintosh product line was becoming stagnant due to a failed effort to modernize its System 7 operating system. Jobs began dealing directly with its Industrial Design team in creating a new Macintosh form factor that would generate some cash flow to allow Apple to complete an OS redesign and catch up to current Windows functionality. With Jobs as CEO, any debates between prioritizing aesthetics versus ease-of-manufacturing vanished at that point and the aesthetic choices Jobs made for the iMac required injection molding capabilities Apple did not have in house.
It's worth noting that Apple's decision to jettison its own factories wasn't simply because Jobs and the Industrial Design team under Jonathan Ive came up with challenges every three to four years that exceeded in-house capabilities. Jobs would dictate changes to existing products that would require retooling of existing processes only months after their original launch. At that point, it became apparent Apple couldn't afford to retool its own factories while keeping up with a more active product pipeline. It also became apparent that Apple couldn't afford to fall back to higher amounts of manual labor to assemble components whose designs thwarted automation. The quantity of labor required at American (or even Mexican or Irish) rates was cost prohibitive.
By roughly 2002, the faster pace of obsolescence of tooling for specific models and vastly higher amounts of human labor required for assembly led Apple to flip its strategy completely. Previously, Apple had focused on what some might have viewed as more simple, boring designs that lent themselves to higher degrees of automation to reduce costs. Now, Apple was focused on delivering "elegant" products with seemingly impossible physical designs that required much higher levels of manual labor – none of which could be afforded unless done in Asia at labor rates that were one tenth those of American factory workers.
To get an idea of the type of labor that is NOT automated with Apple products, search YouTube for videos where people attempt to take apart an iMac desktop, MacBook laptop, iPod or iPhone to repair it. Apple doesn't CARE that the process is difficult and time consuming because the people doing that work do that ONE THING all day for up to twelve hours and earn maybe $3 to $5 dollars per hour (wages have gone up since the early 2000s for most Chinese workers).
China's Peculiar Legal and Economic Federalism
A second category of factors that drove the "capture" discussed in the book involves the peculiar forms of legal and economic federalism within China. After Deng Xiaoping took over leadership of China in the 1970s, China adopted a form of communism that was top-down in its establishment of priorities and objectives by a central committee but left most of the implementation details to provincial governments. Provincial leaders do NOT want to miss targets so they compete heavily against each other for projects that can boost numbers that help them achieve their goals. If a goal is set to add 200,000 factory jobs in five years, a province will offer millions (billions) in subsidies for roads, residential housing and utilities to attract Chinese or foreign firms into their province.
Americans hearing of this arrangement and incentives can easily spot similarities to problems in America with corporations pitting cities and states against each other to give away the biggest tax breaks to the company for building a new plant or staying in place. This is a definite problem in America that's been taking place since the 1980s and often involves millions of dollars per negotiation. In China, this dynamic has been going on since the 1980s as well but in the mid-1990s, the Chinese government began leveraging this strategy at billion dollar scales and has continued doing so through to the present. This represents a level of incentives unlike anything seen in any industrial democracy. Apple was one of many firms experiencing the gravitational attraction of that much money sloshing around attempting to entice businesses to move work to China.
Another aspect of China's unique "federalism" is reflected in the realities of inter-province travel. Technically, China doesn't require citizens of one province to obtain a work visa for another province but customs in China still impose another form of friction. In China, the payment of government benefits and delivery of social services is tied to a citizen's registered place of origin and tracked in a system (a process, really) referred to as hukou. From a western perspective, this hukou process combines functional elements of a birth certificate, a Social Security Number and a subtle but insidious government-reinforced social and economic caste system. Citizens can visit other cities in other provinces but living away from one's "origin" requires registering in the new city's hukou system and registering with local police who are not required to grant a registration.
As China set ambitious industrialization goals beginning in the 1990s, VAST numbers of people needed to be relocated from interior rural regions of the countries to the emerging mega-cities established for industrialization hubs. That shuffling of humanity from rural to urban areas coupled with this hukou system essentially created a permanent underclass that, as of 2025, is estimated to be around TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION Chinese. For those Chinese, their "career" choice is pretty much limited to either a) remaining in a giant megacity with an employer imposing inhumane factory work conditions or b) returning to relative poverty in their home of origin.
The size of constraints imposed upon this ENORMOUS collection of marginalized workers explains why labor conditions aren't improving much in China. McGee notes in the book that stories that came out around 2012 regarding extreme work hours led Apple to demand more data regarding work hours and schedules from suppliers to avoid 12+ hour days or 80+ hour weeks, etc. The data was gathered for a year or so, numbers improved (went down) for a while, then seemed to flat-line. When Apple operations managers in China investigated why the numbers stopped improving, they were essentially told, "when you give us two conflicting impossible goals, we're going to choose to meet the goal that makes us the most money." Apple didn't alter its production goals or expected cost pricing. Apple simply stopped distributing the report internally and stopped paying any attention to work hour abuses.
American Political and Economic Arrogance
A key insight McGee raises in the book is that his story may be based upon Apple as a company but there are wider factors at work in America that also made this "capture" possible. These factors boil down to political and economic arrogance of American politicians, business managers and academics.
China's drive towards industrialization started with Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s, became rocket fueled within China in the mid 1990s but was further aided by America's decision to grant China most favored nation status in 2000 at the end of the Clinton Administration. At the time in 2000, American politicians were all smiles. The Soviet Union collapsed ten years before, internet technology was fueling prosperity no one could imagine or foresee ending and the federal government was running a budget surplus. Politicians, businesses and arm-chair historians in America were confident that expanding trade with China would expose Chinese communism to the positive corrosive force of capitalism which would inevitably lead to democracy. How are you going to hold down the billion once they get their hands on American blue jeans and fast food chains? That was the overall vibe at the time.
In hindsight from 2025, it is clear that Americans were totally delusional at that time. But even at that time, there were zero facts in evidence for Americans to make those assumptions. The same Chinese leader that opened the country for business, Deng Xiaoping, also ordered the brutal crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that killed thousands. When Xiaoping ceded power in 1989 to Jiang Zemin, Zemin continued Xiaoping's policies that emphasized economic growth and self-sufficiency while limiting democracy and human rights.
The final element of American arrogance and ignorance that clouded the judgment of policymakers and business leaders alike was a cult-like belief in the "efficient market hypothesis." The "efficient market" hypothesis originated in 1970 but grew to dominate economic and business theory taught in business schools throughout America. The key to its popularity is that it invented a logical-sounding framework to explain why corporations should be free to focus solely on increasing stock prices at the expense of pretty much any other consideration.
According to the efficient market hypothesis, the market of actual / potential stock buyers was collectively so efficient at evaluating a company's future economic cash flows and risks that stock prices perfectly reflected a company's value. The implication was that ANYTHING a company did to increase that stock price meant that "efficient market" thought the company did something of value to increase that price and the market's judgment included all negative outcomes and externalities. If the stock price went up, the company's "value" truly did go up. No need to overthink it. Another manifestation of Adam Smith's invisible hand.
America emerged from World War II as the only intact industrialized democracy. It had invested in manufacturing capacity for four years that produced much of the supplies for the western forces and much of that brand new capital was rapidly converted to civilian production. American businesses enjoyed nearly twenty five years (from 1946 to 1970) of unequaled capacity and efficiency. By 1970 however, American business had grown complacent. Relatively little had been invested since the end of WWII and businesses just milked these quarter century old assets for profits. By the 1970s, foreign countries began leapfrogging America's older technologies and quality and productivity began to catch up and exceed that of America.
By the 1980s, leaders of those grossly inefficient businesses, mentally armed with efficient market theory, assumed costs could be reduced and profits increased by shifting manufacturing to foreign countries with labor costs often one tenth those of US workers. Those same leaders convinced themselves that as long as the "mental work" – the design work – continued to be done in-house, the grunt work – actual stamping / machining / assembly – could be outsourced to trained monkeys and the company would retain control of its intellectual property, profitability and fate. Executives saw their stock prices go up in response to reducing labor costs and, thoroughly brainwashed by efficient market hypothesis thinking, convinced themselves this was progress.
Apple in its 2.0 Jobs-led incarnation believed this in its entirety. Apple wasn't the only American firm that believed this fairy tale but Apple's unique (irrational?) fixation on "industrial design" aesthetics had a unique impact on China as Apple outsourced manufacturing. Stated bluntly, because of its fixation on "cool but impossible" physical human factors, Steve Jobs and Apple were a pain in the ass for manufacturing firms to deal with. However, Apple's product evolution cycle essentially meant that being an Apple partner would always stress a firm with the most difficult "use case" imaginable before ANY other company would present a need for that use case. Any firm that could deliver that capability for Apple would then have it in their toolkit to use for any other competitor or to use in other product sectors.
This feedback loop between all of these design, labor, political and economic forces is the essence of the book.
The Apple Squeeze
One of the key chapters of the book that ties all of these destructive economic and political forces together is entitled The Apple Squeeze. The author starts the chapter by recapping a stunning business statistic that has held true since someone first crunched the numbers in 2015.
The most insane statistic about Apple's business is this: The iPhone accounts for fewer than 20 percent of smartphones sold around the world, yet it routinely boasts more than 80 percent of industry profits. In no other market does a minority player command this kind of dominance…
This statistic reflects a unique combination of forces that collectively counteract forces that would normally yield a positive (versus negative) correlation between market share measured in UNITS and market share measured in REVENUE. If hundreds of years of economic theory are held to remain true, this can only happen if other forces and numbers are being ignored or overlooked. McGee makes it clear that Apple should have been able to spot the disconnect.
In the narrative that describes the start of Tim Cook's tenure at Apple in the late 1990s, the book summarizes a key tactic Cook applied in all contract negotiations with vendors:
Cook was fond of teaching colleagues to "be aggressive and unreasonable" when negotiating with suppliers. Max Paley, a vice president of graphics at the time, recalls not really knowing what this meant. Cook would say in a calm, deliberative cadence: "Don't… ever… be… afraid… to… be… unreasonable." What did that mean? Was cook saying to be a jerk? Paley wasn't sure, but he later grew to understand and respect it. "What he was really saying as that it's a typical thing for people – even in business negotiations with a supplier – to try to figure out: What's a reasonable thing to ask them? What they are likely to be able to do?" Paley says. "Whereas he was kinda saying, 'You have no clue. You have no idea what the supplier might actually be capable of. So don't be afraid to ask for the moon. Ask for everything you want. Ask for everything you need. If they can't do it, they'll say no.'"
This is a perfectly valid tactic to adopt in negotiations with third parties and it reflected Apple's internal corporate culture to a tee so Cook was just the newest addition to the ranks using this in routine operations. However, Apple leaders failed to ponder a crucial corollary to this maxim… If you keep asking for terms you KNOW are unreasonable and your partner keeps accepting them, there's a reason for it.
Apple executives all drank the Apple Kool-Aid and assumed that vendors delivering the next impossible project to meet Apple's latest set of unreasonable needs were doing so because of some combination of the following reasons:
Apple's internal technical prowess was actually correct and the impossible task WAS possible
Apple's "vision" was so inspiring even for its vendors that it was able to "will" the impossible into the possible (a concept famously termed the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" during Jobs' tenure)
Apple's operational leaders simply browbeat its vendors to deliver Apple's impossible result
Apple leadership assumed the vendor was eating out-sized costs and risks for the mere privilege of being able to say they worked with Apple as a means of attracting business from competitors
The last bullet above HAS actually been a strong motivation for all of the vendors that have been sucked into the Apple ecosystem over time. However, missing from the understanding of Apple leadership was the possibility that Apple's own calculation of "unreasonableness" was drastically undervaluing an economic benefit that was being delivered to the vendor. And an expert in supply chains and procurement contracting like Tim Cook should have been able to spot this problem.
Think about it in these terms. You've negotiated with a vendor year after year after year. In each new negotiation, you put your "unreasonable ask" on the table as you've been brainwashed to do. And each time, the vendor accepts the proposal with virtually no pushback. Yet you are confident you are coming out on the winning side year after year. What's likely happening? It's likely there are other financial and strategic implications of the deal that you are ignoring that your vendor is pricing into their decision to accept, push back or reject. If you are unaware of that hidden factor, YOU are not making a fully informed decision when signing the deal.
Another example… Imagine you're a world-famous, extremely wealthy investor and you like to buy a new car every year. No Camry or Altima for you. A Range Rover, Ferrari, or Porsche every time. Following the Cook rule, each time you walk into WheelsRUs, you low-ball your offer by $30,000 or so to test the dealer's markup on the vehicles. Yet every year, the dealer takes your first offer. How much are you really paying for the car?
If the dealer is willing to lose $30,000 to you every year, it COULD be that they are bragging around town to other potential customers that they are your preferred car dealer to try to land sales with other rich buyers. But it could ALSO be that the dealer is installing a GPS tracker in your car that can track your whereabouts 24x7 and selling that insight to crooked investors who are using it to track who you meet as part of your business deals so they can front-run your deals for millions of dollars, potentially putting those business deals at risk.
This is what was happening in Apple's dealings with its vendors. The book quotes numerous employees at different vendors who all basically said the same thing – we hate working for Apple but doing so builds skills and adds equipment to our factories that positions us to do exactly the same thing for every other company. Engineers at these vendors developed such high levels of expertise in the materials and techniques Apple's products were driving that possession of the know-how has shifted to being nearly 100% in the heads of the vendors. Even if Apple wanted to build a factory in India or back in America, APPLE engineers would be unable to train a team of engineers on the manufacturing of its products. That DNA is not present within Apple in sufficient quantities to support plants anywhere but China.
The key point in McGee's book is that the dynamic forces that industry experts call the "Apple Squeeze" first appear on paper to have created a consumer electronics world where Apple can extract eighty percent of an entire industry's PROFITS from only twenty percent of its VOLUME leaving its competitors to fight over crumbs. In reality, they have also created a dynamic that has transferred nearly one hundred percent of the know-how and actual physical capabilities required for these products into China nearly exclusively and China – and not just Chinese companies but China the country -- is now capable of using those resources in any way it chooses.
As proof of this, McGee describes the release of the iPhone X which was released in 2018 and featured a novel "infinity edge" screen that gave Apple phones a unique feature no other phones had. At least, for five months, at which point competing phones from Huawei and other Chinese makes were released with nearly IDENTICAL physical attributes and features, all made in the same factories as the iPhoneX. By 2019, Huawei began outselling Apple in China by a three to one ratio. McGee points out the only event that saved Apple was a decision by President Trump at the time to push for a ban on all Huawei products in the US – ostensibly because of concerns about security back-doors in their gear targeted at telecommunications providers for their backbone networks. However, what truly halted Huawei in its tracks was a ban imposed on exports of all 5G chips to Huawei. Since Huawei made both cellular phones and cellular network equipment, this instantly crushed Huawei's ability to deliver consumer and provider gear compatible with the newest cellular network technologies being deployed worldwide.
One Technical Aside
McGee's narrative references one challenge Apple faced with sales in China that created a ripple effect few consumers understand but experience every day. This effect is a good illustration of how a firm doing business in a market whose sheer size creates its own economic weather can lead to undesirable and unavoidable side effects in unexpected ways.
Every consumer is familiar with the use of unique serial numbers being assigned to complex products with dozens / hundreds / thousands of parts. Manufacturers can track lot numbers of parts used each day and map them to the serial number of any final product that took on a part from any given lot. This helps quality control and diagnosis of problems after the product is in the hands of the customer.
Most consumers are now becoming aware of the concept of PART serialization. Complex products such as cars and computers have had serial numbers on individual PARTS for decades but in the last ten years, computing power in the final product has been leveraged to scan the operating product for all the serial numbers of all of these critical parts and STOP the device from functioning or limit its operations if any part-level serial number detected doesn't match the part serial number originally detected during assembly at the factory.
Customers HATE part serialization because it can limit their ability to fix or upgrade devices on their own, requiring them instead to use "factory-authorized" repair channels and pay more for the privilege of doing something they should be able to do themselves.
McGee points out in the book that Apple's adoption of part serialization was primarily due to wholesale fraud it experienced with the iPhone in China. Chinese firms became so adept at counterfeiting iPhones down to the shrink-wrapped packaging that even Apple Store employees couldn't differentiate fakes from genuine units. Chinese buyers would bring fake iPhones to Apple stores due to problems and Apple would realize the phone was counterfeit but using a cloned serial number from a real phone. Adopting parts serialization made it easier to detect forged device serial numbers. If a device with SERIAL111 left the factory mapped to PARTA111, PARTB111 and PARTC111 but that SERIAL111 identifier later showed up during activation mapped to PARTA222, PARTB222, PARTC222, that unit was counterfeit and any attempt to activate it or honor repair work would be rejected.
In that light, it's not that Apple or similar manufacturers adopting this tactic are specifically doing so just to annoy their customers and limit the ability to repair / replace components, but the net effect is the same. It's an inevitable result when a country with a billion potential buyers doesn't protect intellectual property and allows its companies to blatantly clone proprietary designs.
A Marshall Plan for America
The real takeaway from Apple in China is that the decimation of domestic electronics manufacturing within the US is just a microcosm of a larger strategic failure in business and politics that has created identical impacts across every manufacturing sector. As American business executives have rewarded themselves more lavishly over the decades, they have become more deluded about where value is added in the design, manufacturing, distribution and retailing of products. They have minimized investment in plant and equipment and relied upon open trade to shift work to regions paying ten to fifteen percent of livable American wages and supported cuts in public education and government funded research that form the basis for future innovation. All to boost the next quarter's profits and lower their personal taxes.
Apple has made the point that the resources and expertise they require to deliver their inspired products simply do not exist in America. But they didn't exist in China, either. McGee makes the point that Apple invested BILLIONS of dollars over decades CREATING those skills in another country. Specifically, by 2015, Apple was investing $55 billion PER YEAR in China. In contrast, the much-vaunted CHIPS act passed in 2022 to attempt to resurrect chip fabrication within the US committed the US government to spending $52 billion over FOUR years. As another comparison, the US spent $13 billion -- $172 billion in 2025 dollars -- between 1948 and 1952 helping to rebuild thirteen countries across Western Europe after World War II under the Marshall Plan.
The real takeaway from Apple in China but left unaddressed by its author is Apple's current predicament and the larger predicament of the United States are the direct result of the failure of the American government to meaningfully enforce antitrust laws and a grossly flawed tax code that rewards capital gains which can be manipulated and punishes actual wages from labor. Ultimately, these predicaments stem from a faith on the part of American leaders that unbridled capitalism is the ultimate partner of democracy and is the most effective agent for creating democracy where it doesn't exist and maintaining democracy where it does exist. This faith is completely self-serving for those who believe it most fervently and completely unfounded based on real-world experience.
Lax antitrust enforcement allowed a single American corporation following its own financial interests to make decisions with grave economic, social and national security implications for an entire country. A society in which a single corporation attains a market capitalization of $3 trillion dollars amid an economy whose yearly economic production totals $30.5 trillion has no relation to the "invisible hand" market forces that create true efficiency and competition.
American tax policies accentuate the power of large corporations and the wealthy citizens that control them by rewarding strategies which boost stock prices and produce capital gains taxed at lower rates. Lower tax revenues are used as a motivation to cut government spending on primary, secondary and university level education essential to creating workers able to accommodate rapid changes in manufacturing needs.
The belief that engaging in trade with China would automatically enlighten the Chinese to change their policies regarding fair labor practices, human rights and democracy led the American government and American businesses to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to bootstrap China's industries while gutting on-shore capabilities in America. At the same time, the American government rewarded American businesses for the temporary boost in profits via tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
McGee's citation of statistics regarding the Marshall Plan are very apt for the situation America faces. In 2025, it's America itself that needs a Marshall Plan. Much of our water and sewer infrastructure is 110-130 years old. Our transportation system is crippled by Robert Moses-era thinking about public versus private transit priorities that was demonstrably wrong when it was new one hundred and ten years ago. And federal and state governments are proposing laws that would further gut funding for public education required to raise the minimum level of proficiency required in modern business. For a glimpse into America's future with its current priorities, you only need to compare the economies of Western Europe in 1989 versus those in Eastern Europe. America lost this economic war. Without a legitimate Marshall Plan scale investment in our own future to rebuild, that future will be very bleak.
After Russia initiated a wide-scale attack on Kiev the weekend of May 25, 2025 with over 360 drones, Ukraine responded with a carefully prioritized series of attacks over multiple days and multiple targets culminating in what many are terming an attack that amounts to Russia's Pearl Harbor – an attack that destroyed nearly one third of Russia's second strike nuclear bomber capability. Most astute reporters have gone beyond explaining how Ukraine's latest move drastically alters the balance of power and risk in the specific battle of Russia versus Ukraine – one that as of May 25 had been looking very badly for Ukraine – to explain how Ukraine's strike serves as a huge benefit to the NATO mission. These observations are entirely correct but still omit a much more ominous implication of this attack on America's defense. Understanding that implication is easier with a summary of the events over the past week.
Things Were Looking So Good
As of the weekend of May 25, 2025, Vladimir Putin had to believe he had regained the upper hand in his war on Ukraine after dropping bombs across Kiev with an estimated 360 drones. This constituted one of the biggest sustained attacks of the war and, true to Putin's tendencies, focused nearly exclusively on civilian targets and public utility infrastructure to maximize civilian terror and inconvenience. The attacks certainly had those effects on Ukrainians. However, Ukraine responded with a series of counterattacks that, considered separately, appear like a collection of independent special ops gambits that all paid off. However, when considered as a group, they reflect a level of innovation and strategic thinking that are unprecedented, both due to Ukraine's unique existential peril and the technology now available. Between May 28 and June 1, Ukraine landed all of the following blows on Russia, IN RUSSIA:
destroyed a plant near Moscow manufacturing traditional munitions as a follow-up to an earlier attack on April 22, 2025 which destroyed an estimated 264,000 tons of munitions, drones and missiles stockpiled at Russia's 51st arsenal in the Vladimir Oblast
destroyed a different plant near Moscow that was one of Russia's primary manufacturing plants for drones with roughly equal capabilities to those Russia has been using from Iran
destroyed two different bridges carrying rail routes in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, blocking them for potentially months from being used by Russia to move heavy equipment and supplies
used drones to drop a bomb on one of Russia's nuclear submarines while docked in Russia's Arctic port, putting the submarine completely out of commission for years, if the vessel can be salvaged at all
used drones to bomb facilities on the base housing that submarine, destroying one of the key command and control hubs in Russia's military
staged hundreds of drones within modular shipping containers with remote-controlled, removable roofs, hauled those containers into strategic positions within Russia MONTHS AGO, then, via remote control, opened the roofs of those containers, piloted the drones up and out of the containers and navigated them to Russian air bases where at least 41 Russian bombers were destroyed or rendered incapable of flight
used drones to destroy a handful of Russian tanker jets used to refuel long-range bombers
used drones to destroy a handful of Russian radar monitoring planes (somewhat equivalent in functionality to America AWACS planes) used to monitor airborne threats, coordinate defenses and attacks and provide the ability to operate command and control functions from the air
Russia's Pearl Harbor
Any ONE of these operations by itself would constitute a major success for Ukraine but taken as a whole, they are an indication of a much more important shift not only in the course of the war in Ukraine but wars in general. Most commentators have highlighted how tightly these actions interacted to drastically impair Russia's immediate ability to sustain war against Ukraine by
destroying existing stockpiles of munitions and drones, already in short supply due to Russia's unsophisticated approach of simply bombing anything that looks civilian
destroying physical transportation infrastructure at key bottlenecks to prevent backfill of destroyed supplies close to the front from armories further away
destroying the plants that manufacture munitions and weapons, making it impossible for the Russian military to fill the enormous void created by the destruction of existing supplies
Most commentators have also thought through these impacts on the larger security situation between Russia and Europe and pointed out the following limitations Russia faces:
Destruction of 41 nuclear-capable bombers not only limits Russia's ability to bomb Ukraine, it virtually eliminates Russia's ability to reach any part of Western Europe via the air
Destruction of the tanker jets further impairs Russia's ability to use long-range bombers located in its eastern provinces to attack Europe
Destruction of the "AWACS-like" planes has further crippled Russia's abilities to monitor its airspace to defend against attacks, abilities that have already been shown to be far below what anyone previously would have expected for a nuclear power
Destruction of established command and control bases further impair's Russia's ability to defend its perimeter and airspace – even if all of the military personnel survived the attacks, the communications equipment needed to perform their mission is likely unusable and cannot be reproduced in a new location overnight
In a nutshell, the common conclusion reached by virtually every commentator has been that Russia just experienced its own Pearl Harbor of the twenty first century. By some estimates, this coordinated attack has eliminated roughly thirty to forty percent of Russia's war-making capacity. One obviously hopes the rest of the Pearl Harbor analogy won't hold true and that Russia will not wake up from this shock, magically reconstitute its domestic manufacturing capacities and somehow return to a position of power to crush its attacker. That would seem to defy all current economic signs in the country. Most of the planes destroyed haven't been manufactured in two decades so there's no assembly line in mothballs waiting to be resurrected into service. Many of the younger educated Russians needed to manage a turnaround in Russian manufacturing fled the country at the beginning of the war to avoid being conscripted into service. Most importantly, Russia lacks the economic wherewithal to fund such a turnaround. Sanctions are preventing them from generating any income from oil and any effort they make to destroy power cables, communication cables and pipelines into Europe in an attempt to bully Europe into ceding to Russian demands only cripples economic growth that generates demand for Russian oil.
Ukraine's Wake-up Call to America
While most news reports cover the Ukrainian and European angles to these recent military attacks executed by Ukraine against Russia, most analysis leaves perhaps the most important impact unaddressed. America has racked up TRILLIONS of dollars in debt over forty years to design and manufacture extremely complex weapons systems based upon modes of military conflict that are sixty to eighty years old. In current 2025 dollars, America has evolved from military plans relying on $22 million dollar F4 phantoms to $60 million for an F16 and from $84 million for a B-52 bomber to $700 million for a B1 bomber and $2.13 billion for a B2 Stealth bomber. America has spent over $6 billion on new Nimitz class aircraft carriers which require a complete overhaul within 10-15 years whose cost can equal their original purchase price. The absolute latest class of aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford class, has cost $13 billion to date. America has spent $100 billion dollars on a fleet of Littoral Combat Ships ("little crappy ships") that are being removed from service before even a majority were completed.
The argument for continuing America's defense strategy and consequent spending is based upon archaic concepts of projecting power and securing the seas for trade. In a world where shipping paths might be blocked by an enemy operating submarines or surface ships in proximity to a path, having the ability to position an aircraft carrier with thirty fighter jets aboard might act as a deterrent. In a world where an enemy might impair shipping lanes by flying jets from island bases one hundred miles away, having long-range bombers capable of avoiding radar detection that can take out those island bases and return home might be a deterrent. But the world is no longer solely imperiled by symmetric, high-cost military capabilities. Technology created a world that has essentially "democratized terror" and made it more affordable for use by rouge nations and stateless actors alike.
The current budget bill being pushed through Congress includes ONE TRILLION DOLLARS for defense spending, an increase of $150 billion over the current 2025 budget. $25 billion dollars of that is being assigned to a new program termed the Golden Dome, a new missile defense system with desired capabilities very similar to the infamous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars") program launched in 1984. That program spent between $50 and $100 billion (apparently no one knows exactly how much) and pretty much confirmed most of the technologies required for success were at least twenty years in the future so very little value came from it.
In 2025, we might have 10,000-fold increases in computing power, memory and communication speeds to make many tracking functions envisioned in 1984 possible but the nature of the threat is now completely different. An existential threat isn't limited to arriving atop an ICBM that cost billions to design, manufacture and operate. The Ukrainians just demonstrated an existential threat can be trucked into the country in dozens of semis over months of time, parked within minutes by air of strategic infrastructure driving the power grid, pipelines, chemical factories, etc., then unleashed en masse via remote control with no obvious external actor to counterattack if any response capabilities even exist after the first round.
Is a $13 billion dollar aircraft carrier carrying thirty F35-C fighters costing $110 million each a meaningful defense against one hundred "first person visual" (FPV) remote-controlled drones costing about $400 each that can carry a one pound high-explosive bomb? Think through the math. For the cost of a single advanced F35-C stealth fighter on a carrier, a country could purchase 275,000 drones. Increase the size of the drone and the bomb payload capability and assume the drone price is $10,000 instead of 400. Now the $110 million buys 11,000 drones. How is a single fighter going to shoot down 11,000 individual targets that are only a few feet in circumference and weigh virtually nothing? How are such small objects going to appear on radar? If they DO appear on radar, how useful is that radar image going to be to targeting algorithms with DOZENS or HUNDREDS flying in a veritable swarm?
The last week of conflict wasn't just a Pearl Harbor for Russia. It should be a Pearl Harbor Redux for America. Our military spending is already far past the point of providing actual security commensurate with the cost. Our military spending is already insane given the insolvency it will likely create as we increase defense spending while cutting taxes and every program providing meaningful benefits to education, public health, science and care for the elderly. But to spend this insane amount of money on weapons and strategies which have been proven in front of our eyes to be completely useless in future conflicts? That's indescribable insanity.
Are Americans in general capable of learning the right lessons from an enemy's losses? Maybe. Is America's President, Donald Trump, capable of learning the right lessons from an enemy's losses? Absolutely not. Trump has never demonstrated the ability to learn anything from anyone. He's far less likely to do so when he thinks the enemy doing the learning the hard way is his friend. Are Republicans in control of the entire federal government capable of learning anything? Not in the present logical, ethical and moral vacuum created by Trump. And here we sit, watching one of the most painless but crucial lessons ever taught play out in front of us, while every leader in a position to react and change course appropriately is isolated from reality in a self-imposed bubble of ignorance. This is not looking good for America's future.
Mark Twain - Ron Chernow, 1039 pages + notes and index
Since 1990, author Ron Chernow has crafted a series of biographies of figures in American history that go far beyond answers to basic who / what / when / where questions to address WHY those individuals came to exert such influence in the world in their day and HOW their work still affects the world today. His books The House of Morgan and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller provided insight into how both American business and government were corrupted by concentrations of wealth which still count among America's biggest threats in the present. His biography Alexander Hamilton provided insight into the personalities that drove the debates over the methods of governance America would adopt and demonstrated how Hamilton's intellect, writing abilities, sheer productive output and certainly ego resulted in him having perhaps the greatest influence on the precedents set – often intentionally, with great debate and sometimes randomly – for America's unique federalist form of government. Chernow went on to write biographies on George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant that provided insights on how two different generals evolved into Presidents and how those evolutions were shaped in part by slavery within the United States.
Chernow's latest book Mark Twain traces the literary and intellectual evolution of a man who became world renown for not only his novels but his satires and critiques delivered via short stories, op-eds and stage appearances throughout the world. This new biography is as well-researched as all of Chernow's prior work but the net effect on the reader is far different than any of the other works. After plowing through all 1039 pages, two possible conclusions are likely to come to mind... 1) Thank God I'm done. 2) I dislike virtually every person referenced in this book, including Mark Twain. ESPECIALLY Mark Twain.
That seems like an odd conclusion to reach for someone who is then spending the time to review the book. Why not just walk away and avoid reviewing the book at all? Primarily, because Chernow's intent in writing these biographies and the reader's intent in reading them isn't (and shouldn't be) one of mere entertainment. The goal is enlightenment.
In prior biographies, Chernow's research identified previously unknown events or contributors to those events influenced by the subject of the book that are interesting in their own right. As those previously unknown influences are tallied over the subject's life, Chernow makes a case for how the overall arc of that career wasn't merely a collection of random collisions between person and circumstance but a result of a willingness of that subject to exert their sense of propriety consistently over time, even in circumstances where doing so bucked current thinking. Essentially, each subject came across as someone playing chess and consistently thinking three or four moves ahead of the world around them.
In contrast, after reading Mark Twain, the reader comes away with an impression that Twain's fame in large part stemmed from the coincidence of three forces at a critical point in America's history:
a writer growing up with a poor education in a racist society
a writer possessing a gift for terse, satirical aphorisms that cut through hypocrisy and flowery language and communicated an idea with punch
the evolution of mass media in a world made smaller via trains and steam ships that made world travel not just possible but common
Chernow never makes the case directly, but the real takeaway from the biography is that Mark Twain could be viewed as the world's first successful "influencer." And that suggestion carries with it all of the skepticism, if not outright scorn, that the term attracts when applied in the present. Prior to reading the book, a reader might have been expecting to glean more insight into the complex thought that Twain put into his work over his career to "bend the arc" consistently in a desired direction. After reading the book, it is possible for a reader to come away with the impression that Mark Twain became a "great American novelist" because he wrote what he lived every day – ignorance, greed, hypocrisy -- and peppered his output with comedic, sound-byte friendly outbursts of moral outrage on racism, women's rights and business.
The Naive Narrator
An interesting parallel between the biography Mark Twain and the work of Twain himself is the challenge posed by the language used at some past point in time. Twain's work most famously encountered this problem in Huckleberry Finn in which Twain's prose replicated the dialects and attitutes he encountered throughout his childhood, nearly verbatim, including frequent use of the N-word. From its publication to the present, many readers have great difficulty in seeing value in a book using such an offensive word hundreds of times. Twain infused the prose of the book with the word as part of his use of a naive narrator mechanism for delivering the core point of the book (in the famous "I guess I'll go to Hell" scene).
Huck was an ignorant child raised by a violent father and ignorant aunt amid a racist society who absorbed everything he was taught without thinking. As the book progresses and Huck spends time with Jim drifting down the Mississippi, despite all of that ignorant, racist coaching, Huck's conscience wakes up as he realizes Jim is his equal in every respect. Huck reaches this conclusion after realizing he is technically helping a fugitive slave escape, a criminal offense in his society and a "sin" according to his warped "Christian" upbringing. As Huck weighs his options – turn Jim in like a "Christian" or help him escape and "sin" -- his conscience finally snaps and leads him to the correct moral answer while his "logical" mind, warped by his upbringing, tells himself he'll go to Hell for helping a black man escape slavery.
The N-word permeates the text to reflect how racism permeated America at the time, yet the wrongfulness of racism, despite that head start, could still be grasped by an ignorant, unschooled child. The reader, being multiple chapters into the book by this critical point, is already steps ahead of this ignorant child narrator and "knows" what the correct thing to do is. Via this narrative device, Twain's point was essentially if an ignorant thirteen year old boy can solve this morality problem, why can't YOU, an educated adult? If you're reading this book and think you're ahead of the narrator in this plot, why aren't YOU applying this in your life? The fact that Twain didn't suddenly STOP using the N-word in the book after that point in the plot makes a more subtle, but equally important point. Great, you learned a lesson ("slavery is evil and needs to be eliminated") but if you were wrong on that, you were likely wrong on many related topics and that more moral evolution on your part is required.
Possibly without realizing it, Chernow faced a similar problem researching and writing about Twain himself. With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, who was a VERY gifted writer, most of Chernow's biography subjects were primarily "doers" rather than thinkers and writers. In contrast, Twain was a writer by profession and his first inclination in nearly every circumstance was to write. The output of that inclination might be a travelogue, a short story, a novel, a flowery letter to a family member or fan or a BLISTERING diatribe at some party who suddenly fell out of favor for some real or imagined offense.
In short, Twain's use of the naive narrator in Huckleberry Finn was authentic because he was writing from his personal experience. One takeaway from the entire biography is that, in modern parlance, Twain demonstrated EVERY behavior of someone with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He hated school, stopped attending at age 12 but was a voracious reader so he was nearly entirely self-taught. At various points in the biography, it is mentioned that as an adult, people who encountered Twain were amazed at how he could hold forth in discussions on virtually any topic. Such a genius.
Autodidact or ADHD
What also becomes obvious from the biography which Chernow doesn't really mention is that Twain may have been self-taught, but it is not clear he learned much from what he read. If a self-described autodidact reads Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy but cannot explain the basics of calculus or calculate a derivative, did reading the book really accomplish anything other than introduce vocabulary to throw out at a party? Twain's decisions about business investments and the handling of his own publishing work created repeated, catastrophic financial losses throughout his career. Twain not only repeated the same mistakes after some lull in activity, he repeatedly made identical flawed choices, sometimes within DAYS of concluding efforts to recover from prior failures.
As one example, Twain became convinced he was being cheated of royalties from his first publisher so he decided he would start his own publishing firm. The first project undertaken by his firm used a subscription model in which books were essentially sold door-to-door rather than via a retail bookseller. The books were sold under an installment plan so a set being purchased for say $40 dollars for 10 volumes would collect that $40 dollars over time, yet the customer would receive the entire set of books up front. Twain failed to grasp the cash flow problem created by that model. He further failed to recognize that the more successful the sales of the book became, the more acute the pressure for up-front costs to PRINT the books would be without any incoming cash. Did any of Twain's vast readings cover concepts of basic business and accounting?
Many of those mistakes reflect not only ignorance in matters of finance, general business and investing but an impulsivity obviously attributable to ADHD from a modern vantage point that is clear throughout the book. While Chernow's exposition covers this pattern of behavior in exhausting detail, Chernow never returns to the perspective of the present to address this dynamic in modern terms.
The Consummate Hypocrite
Over Twain's entire life, his choices reflected a consistent streak of hypocrisy regarding both wealth and power. Twain managed to marry up well, finding a wife whose family netted consistent income from a coal processing business serving the railroads – a business equivalent to printing money. Once married, Twain moved frequently between various homes and apartments in Connecticut and New York. The "homes" were not newlywed fixer-uppers or starter homes. Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut featured TWENTY FIVE ROOMS, 11,500 square feet of space and a staff including a coachman, a housekeeper, a personal maid for wife Livy and a butler. And despite that luxury, they still summered most years at another home owned by Livy's side of the family. Those fixed costs mounted quickly during slack periods in Twain's writing income or when his failed business ventures triggered recognition of enormous losses.
During these budget crunch periods, did Twain ever consider downsizing? Nope. His ADHD driven stress-coping mechanisms kicked in, triggered his wanderlust and he would take the family on extended trips to live abroad while making appearances to make money etc. while leaving the staff in place, burning money at an even faster rate on two continents at a time. At a later point, Twain at least rented the Hartford home out during their absence but neither Twain nor his wife could reach the more logical conclusion that they needed to economize rather than frazzling their nerves and further stressing his wife's ever-fragile health worrying about money.
How much of Twain's tribulations regarding the cost of his homes and lifestyle were due to hypocrisy versus the previously mentioned ADHD demanding the constant stimulus of new things and his particularly poor allotment of common sense related to money is debatable. But Twain's willingness to hobnob with rich or powerful people was a pure reflection of hypocrisy and vanity. As an example, Twain's worldwide tour to raise money to retire debts led to a stint in South Africa. Twain's observations from that trip eventually made their way into his 1897 book Following the Equator which contained this scathing comment on whites in South Africa:
The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways.—They are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of “purchase!” for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue “regulations” requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve – his master is under no obligation to support him.
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude “civilization.” We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.
Taken out of context, the initial portion of that quote sounds atrocious – Twain is sarcastically stating the position of the white racist minority to highlight its offensiveness -- but Twain's true position becomes more evident as the quote goes on. However, that quote and that ultimate conclusion came well after leaving the country. While actually in the country, in the moment, he had no qualms with spouting his grossly uninformed opinions to the local press.
Upon arrival, he spoke in favor of a group of "rebels" led by Brit Cecil Rhodes who had attempted to topple the government controlled by Boers, a faction of white supremacists with ties back to Dutch settlers. (Those Boers are now referred to as Afrikaners, the same Afrikaners that jailed Nelson Mandela who eventually led a movement that removed them from power.) After meeting with some prisoners taken by the Boer government, Twain made some comments to the press about their living conditions, sarcastically terming them superior to many he had seen in mining camps of the American west. That led the government to dramatically worsen their accommodations for several months before they were released.
Twain later met with the South African President of the country and had a pleasant chat with him. Only after leaving the country did Twain realize a) the "rebels" were tied to the British, b) the "rebel" faction under Cecil Rhodes was as racist as the Boers they wanted to oust from power and c) the native South Africans of the country would suffer equally under either faction, regardless of any distinctions between their historical motivations. Twain enjoyed a meal, bolstered his own fame via the publicity of meeting with a head of state and got something to write home about for his book but was unable to speak truth to power in the moment because he made no concerted effort to understand the actual truth before opening his mouth.
Bridging the Past to the Present
In general, some amount of "vernacular shock" is almost guaranteed when modern minds encounter letters and transcripts of communication from many generations in the past. At a minimum, styles of communication from yesteryear seem far more formal and stuffy than the flood of emails and texts most prevalent in the Internet era or even the movie and radio eras. However, when writing about a writer who already has an instinctual urge to WRITE about anything, it seems likely there will be far more material to review and much of that material will be even more over-the-top in whatever idioms were prevalent at the time.
This is absolutely the case with Twain the writer and with the content quoted within Chernow's biography. And because Chernow is attempting to write a "definitive" biography with diligently footnoted sources for every quote, much of Chernow's surrounding prose providing context for such quotes tends to stay within those historical idioms to avoid a jarring clash between the "context prose" setting up a quote and the literal quote. This snowballs into a very tiresome pattern for the reader. As a writer with a flair for dramatic superlatives, Twain's comments in letters consistently
Describe every new place he is visiting as the most beautiful, magnificent place he has ever seen… Until he's been there two weeks at which point it becomes a cockroach infested dump he cannot wait to leave.
Describe every new business partner as the most brilliant, honest mind he has ever encountered… Until a month later when he becomes convinced that partner is swindling him of all his rightful income from a venture.
Describe every new home or villa he ever purchased or rented (and there were many) as an enchanted place of happiness and delight… Until someone gets sick and the place becomes forever tainted as a hell-hole.
Describe new doctors or "medical facilities" for family members as the surest place to put someone on the mend… Until an inevitable setback occurs, at which point the doctors become know-nothing, over-charging hacks and he never wants to visit the facility again, even if a family member is still there awaiting the cure that will never come.
The extensive use of quotes from letters between Twain and his family and business partners and the overwrought, overly-dramatic language so prevalent in that era, over 1039 pages of it, quickly make the reader begin feeling like they are reading the literary equivalent of a mashup between the movie High Society with Grace Kelly (or The Philadelphia Story that came before it) and Seinfeld. A mashup reflecting a faux gentility of the rich who are nowhere as cultured and smart as they strive to appear...
...with a collection of characters incapable of hugging, showing even a minimum of concern for their fellow humans or learning anything from any of their experiences.
The family letters quoted throughout the book reflect that same upper-crust dialect that Tracy Lord and her little sister Dinah affect to mock two gossip writers who have arrived to collect dirt on her upcoming wedding. But while reflecting that faux devotion to each other on the page, nearly every Twain family member consistently lied to other family members about their own feelings, lied about the health and feelings of others in the family or seemed to spend inordinate amounts of time collecting sympathy from third parties regarding how they suffered so from the suffering of other family members they were actively keeping out of their sight.
Modern readers encountering letters dripping with this Victorian era melodramatic tone are likely to first immediately scoff at the overbearing hyperbole and faux sentimentality but then immediately discount that reaction. The thought might be people of that era didn't know what they didn't know and they had no radio, TV or Internet to distract themselves so they indulged in dramatic letters. They didn't understand the origins of conditions like epilepsy, a multitude of cancers, heart disease (congenital and diet-induced), alcoholism and depression. And untimely deaths weren't an exception, they were the norm. In that era from 1835 to 1910, Twain was a very old man at 74 when he died.
On the other hand, simply offering up a mulligan for Victorian era hyperbole and drama doesn't seem appropriate given the repeated boorish behavior throughout Twain's life. He not only learned nothing about actually operating a business, despite a major failure, he immediately repeated the same error within DAYS of undoing the financial damage from his first mistake. He learned nothing from dealing with scammers and crackpot doctors affecting his family matters and continued ceding complete control to new strangers who happened to cross his path who quickly failed him miserably if not outright cheated him.
For most of the book, Chernow's exposition surrounding this would-be multi-decade soap opera uses a third-person narrator voice that mostly hews to the Victorian era vernacular as the subjects in the book. Only on relatively few occasions does the exposition step all the way back to present day sensibilities to cut through some of the self-delusional posturing of Twain and the other subjects to reference current knowledge regarding medicine, psychology and mental health. As a result, most of the reader's time is spent in that overwrought woe-is-me alas Mama frame that becomes annoying. It becomes so annoying, in fact, that by the end of the book, the only characters in the book that retained any sympathy were...
...Twain's younger brother Henry who died at age 20 in 1858 in a boiler explosion aboard a steamboat.
...His second daughter Olivia (Susy), who died at age 24 in 1896 of spinal meningitis. Susy was likely Twain's favorite child but shocked the family when she seemed to fall in love with another female student while away at Bryn Mawr college, leading to her withdrawal (or being withdrawn by her scandalized parents) after a single semester. Susy spent the next six years trying to piece together a singing career (picture Twain as Charles Foster Kane paying for opera lessons for his mistress Susan Alexander) while avoiding the glare of being "Mark Twain's daughter" and battling fatigue and depression.
...Twain's wife Olivia (Livy) who acted as his best editor and guardian against his more toxic vitriol reaching the public until she died at age 58 in 1904 of congestive heart failure.
...and Henry Rogers, a senior executive at Standard Oil who (luckily for Twain) befriended Twain at a point in 1893 where Twain was virtually bankrupt due to losses at his own publishing firm and a pipe-dream investment Twain made in a machine for setting type that was soundly beat to market by the Linotype. Rogers volunteered to help keep his financial books straight while Twain embarked on a worldwide speaking tour to restock his coffers. Rogers might have been the only person Twain encountered in all of his business dealings who a) actually knew what he was doing, b) in fact did not cheat Twain out of money and actually helped him tremendously and c) was never accused by Twain of thievery. And curiously, Rogers was a noted robber baron of the era, operating in multiple business sectors.
America's First Influencer
Prior to reading the book, the creative arc one might have expected to glean from a biography of Twain was that of someone raised ignert, who, like their character Huck Finn, learned instinctively at an early age some key lessons about slavery, hypocrisy and greed and, consistently over a career, further honed and unified those lessons, producing a body of work at the end that holds together. After reading Chernow's biography of Twain, a much different impression of that career arc emerges.
Twain wasn't the same type of literary artist in the vein of a James Fenimore Cooper or Herman Melville or Charles Dickens. He didn't focus exclusively on long-form work and those novels and travelogues he wrote rarely hinted at older "classic" works that might have informed his material. Twain was comfortable writing for multiple attention spans and his ADHD likely led to his unique ability to convert flashes of insight into short, pithy aphorisms that clicked with readers. In more modern terms, Twain was not so much an F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut or Toni Morrison but more like a topical stand-up comedian or mock-news anchor like Jon Stewart, Colin Jost or (less charitably) Dennis Miller. Miller struck audiences as edgy and hip in his SNL and HBO stints but the same characteristics that matched the zeitgeist in the 1990s never evolved and his commentary seemed to lose any edge based upon any underlying good and came across as snark for snark's sake which ceases to be entertaining.
Twain was among the first writers to expand their career and income by touring the world to recite their works as performances or simply tell new stories or provide ad hoc commentary on stage regarding current events to audiences. This mode of work is instantly familiar to audiences today and Twain was the first author to leverage this model of "infotainment" to achieve worldwide recognition and wealth. But reading history of years of such tours undertaken in parallel with events in his personal life where he was repeating business and personal mistakes over and over is also something people in the present would recognize in "influencer" culture. It is possible to be an influencer capturing clicks and likes and ad revenue without knowing a thing about any subject being "influenced." Knowledge and expertise are not the product being commoditized. Views and likes are being commoditized and there is zero correlation between expertise and popularity.
Chernow's account of Twain's visit to South Africa described earlier provides all of the ingredients to make this point with perfect clarity but Chernow doesn't make this point in the book nor even hint at it. It could be one of the most important takeaways tying the life of Twain to modern circumstances. Sadly, the origins of "influencer" culture is not the only negative parallel to be drawn from Twain to present day fixations on fame, wealth, influence and...
A Second Creepy Parallel With the Present
Mark Twain might not only hold claim to being the first American "influencer", he might also hold claim to being America's first famous rich creep. The first reference Chernow makes to this aspect of Twain's life involves a speech Twain made to a girl's college in London, Ontario. The recently married Twain began flirting with the students after his lecture ended under the conceit of being an old man in need of directions around town. Later Twain began a habit of meeting ten to fourteen year old girls while traveling and "adopting" them as friends during the trip and doting on them as daughters or… (sigh) engaging in months of back and forth correspondence espousing their purity and beauty and charm. One obvious explanation is that these girls were initially adoring fans of his work and Twain enjoyed the adoration from anyone. But weekly correspondence? For months? Between a man in his 60s or 70s and girls under sixteen years old?
Sounding familiar yet?
After Twain's wife Livy died in 1904, Twain voluntarily ceded (to his later regret) control of all of his day to day affairs to Isabel Lyon, a woman already in his sphere acting as organizer of content for his planned autobiography. By the decade of 1900, Twain's obsession with being in the company of young girls Twain termed his "angelfish" reached a point where girls he met would be invited to stay at his house where they could play billiards with Twain and hang out in a dedicated room in his house that even his own daughters were not allowed to enter. Lyon, as the veritable chargè d'affairs of Twain's daily life, helped coordinate these visits, as Chernow describes:
Disappointed by his family, Twain indulged, as compensation, in his late in-life madness: the angelfish. In late July, he wrote to ten-year old Dorothy Quick and pleaded with her to visit him in Tuxedo Park [his residence at the time] for a week. He sent a parallel letter to her mother, promising that Isabel, a former governess in her forties, would pick up Dorothy and deliver her home safely. As further reassurance, Isabel wrote to Mrs. Quick to attest that "both Mr. Clemens & I want Dorothy to be happy, and I too shall love to have her here, as I do love little girls." So Isabel, among her varied duties, was now enlisted as special agent for the angelfish and deployed as protective camouflage to show the world that nothing untoward could happen.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, anyone?
Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega, anyone?
Twain's behavior lasted his entire life. He continued to invite young girls for extended stays at his home until the year before he died. In fairness, there is absolutely zero written correspondence originated by any of the girls who came into his circle from the time of these visits or afterwards that alleges or even hints of ANY sexual contact or even impropriety. However, at the time, those with knowledge of these arrangements were creeped out as much as those seeing this with modern sensibilities and efforts were taken to hide these interactions from the public. Today, much of Twain's written and verbal interactions with DOZENS of these young girls would be immediately categorized as manipulative grooming behavior used by pedophiles or more generally by powerful men against powerless victims. In the present day, we are conditioned by modern realities to assume that when there is this much creepy smoke, there is almost inevitably creepy fire. It is very difficult to review this behavior from one hundred fifteen plus years ago and conclude otherwise.
Twain as the Quintessential American
It was previously mentioned that after reading all 1039 pages of Mark Twain, the reader is left in a position where virtually NONE of the persons referenced in the book are likable. This is most true about Mark Twain himself.
At the time of daughter Susy's death in 1896, Twain was abroad in Europe with wife Livy and daughter Clara working speaking engagements to earn money to escape debts that had triggered bankruptcy. However, the Clemens had received multiple telegrams at the beginning of August 1896 referencing medical issues with Susy back in the States. Finally, a telegram sent on August 14 led wife Livy and daughter Clara to book a return trip to America. Twain curiously chose to remain in England awaiting further confirmation. Chernow writes:
The next day at noon, Livy and Clara departed aboard the Paris from Southhampton on a voyage disturbed by fearful musings. Twain wrote a letter to his wife that expressed a pessimism inexplicably at odds with his behavior. "You & Clara are making the only sad voyage of all of the round-the-world-trip. I am not demonstrative; I am always hiding in my feelings; but my heart was wrung yesterday. I could not tell you how deeply I loved you nor how grieved I was for you nor how I pitied you in this awful trouble that my mistakes have brought upon you. You forgive me, I know, but I shall never forgive myself while the life is in me. If you find our poor Susy in the state I seem to foresee, your dear head will be grayer when I see it next. [Be good & get well, Susy dear, don't break your mother's heart.] This self-flagellation went on. "Livy darling, you are … the highest & finest & loveliest character I have ever known; & I was never worthy of you. You should have been the prize of a better man – a man up nearer to your own level." Twain was consumed by such dread about Susy it makes one wonder – and Twain himself would have cause to wonder – why he had not rushed with his wife and daughter to America.
As events turned out, Susy died on August 18, four days after Livy and Clara set sail to return and Susy was buried before Twain could reach New York on his later trip. In other words, Twain not only missed being able to be present for his daughter's death despite a heads up eighteen days prior, but chose to remain long enough to require his wife to deal with the funeral entirely on her own before returning. This was Twain's reaction for the death of his favorite daughter, in spite of reams of cloying correspondence about her being the best of everything in the world.
After losing wife Livy eight years later in 1904, responsibility for the care of eldest daughter Clara and youngest daughter Jean fell on Twain, who immediately offloaded it to Isabel Lyon. Lyon had already been in Twain's sphere, working to assist him in assembling material for his autobiography. Twain put her in charge of not only his business affairs but decisions about the treatment plans for his surviving daughters who both had many real health issues. His eldest surviving daughter Clara had tendencies towards depression and required frequent trips to sanitariums for "recovery." His youngest daughter Jean suffered from epilepsy which was treated as a taboo illness in society, resulting in her being shuttled off to a never-ending series of treatment centers to be "treated" by the latest voodoo of the day. Jean's inability to attempt leading a normal life and her lack of contact from the family, reinforced by Lyon, led Jean to write a letter to her father complaining that he knew nothing of recent improvements in her health because Lyon was purposely hiding information from him.
Twain responded with a letter to Jean that reflected the most consistent aspect of his behavior over his entire life:
Far from being upset at not being told of Jean's condition, he expressed approval, saying, "That is right, & as it should be, unless it is something that I could remedy. Clara, Miss Lyon & Mr. Paine keep all sorts of distresses from me, & I am very thankful for it – distresses which they are aware I could not remedy, I mean… But whenever there is anything that depends upon me & my help, I want to know all about it.
The mindset in that letter was reflected consistently throughout Twain's adult life in not only his interactions with his own family but his business affairs as well. He didn't want to be bothered with details and when the details spiraled out of control and he was sucked into a situation at its nadir, the blame was laid on anyone or everyone else, then solely with him for a brief spike of despair, then was suppressed to allow the cycle to repeat. Over and over.
That's a dangerous modus operandi for guiding a life yet many of the same behaviors can be seen in modern America. Fixations on fame and notoriety rather than hard-earned expertise and competence. Preferences for internally derived opinions over external, verifiable facts. A desire to avoid the hard work of remaining informed about boring but important day to day details. Insistence on modeling every problem and decision as a black and white issue rather than one of countless colors. Denial of any contributory responsibility for one's own fate despite decades of prior heads up regarding the possible impacts of one's decisions.
Mark Twain achieved the fame he desired but the money that came with it was never enough. Twain relied on his conscience at a few critical points in his life and was able to communicate moral insights sorely needed in America and the world at a few key points along the way. But Twain was unable to fully grasp the stunting nature of the limits of his self-driven education. He had much learning to do but avoided it to pursue more predictable rewards. As a result, as influential as some of his work remains to this day, Twain likely fell short of the best work he might have been capable of producing.
For that reason, Mark Twain may be the quintessential American. There are elements of Twain in all of us. America never was a perfect place and its imperfections have corrupted every generation raised here. But we know that. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union... It's up to everyone to try to do better, for everyone's benefit, not just our own. And recognize no matter how enlightened we think we are, there is darkness that remains to be eliminated.
Today's lesson in crusty legal terms you never thought you needed to care about is brought to you by Donald Trump, who seems likely to sponsor many more future episodes in the coming days. Today's civics vocabulary term is attainder which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as:
attainder (noun): The termination of the civil rights of a person upon a sentence of death or outlawry for treason or a felony.
The term attainder might ring a distant bell with Americans who have watched a lot of legal dramas or were paying attention in a social studies covering American history. That's probably because the concept is referenced in the United States Constitution, specifically in language within Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 which reads:
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
The simplest interpretation of this language is that it prevents both state and federal governments from enacting laws which explicitly target individuals for punishment. A state can pass a law making it illegal to drive faster than 70 mph on any road but a state cannot pass a law that explicitly makes it illegal to drive faster than 70 mph for Joe Schmoe while allowing it for others. The federal government can enact a law removing tax breaks for any corporation selling its products to a particular foreign country but it cannot enact a law removing tax breaks solely for Mango Microprocessors if it sells chips to Monaco.
This ban against bills of attainder in the Constitution was added to explicitly address and prevent specific abuses seen during colonial rule and prior centuries of English history. In some cases in that history, attainders were interpreted to not only affect the named party of the law but to blood relatives as well, extending the abuse to descendants. So obvious were the dangers of bills of attainders that the attainder language added to the Constitution was adopted unanimously by those drafting the Constitution and generated zero debate.
That was then. This is now. And now, the Trump Administration, with 6-3 conservative control of the US Supreme Court, a 53-47 majority in the US Senate and a 220-212 majority in the US House (with 3 vacant seats) seems unable to enact ANY legislation to match its goals using actual legislative processes. Instead, it is issuing executive orders and threats that, if implemented via actual legislation, would represent clearly unconstitutional bills of attainder. The two most recent examples in two days are:
The order from the Department of Homeland Security explicitly banning Harvard University from enrolling foreign students OR hiring foreign faculty or administrators.
A threat from Donald Trump stating that 25% tariffs will be applied to Apple if it does not begin making its products in the US.
If these are merely administrative orders or verbal threats from the President, are they technically bills of attainders? In a world where the US Supreme Court has ruled that a President has a cloak of immunity around "official actions" even after his defense counsel argued such protections would apply to assassinating political enemies, it is sadly no longer clear how court cases addressing these conflicts will be eventually adjudicated. Historically speaking, however, there is ZERO doubt these actions and policies are completely unconstitutional, even if they are being imposed short of an actual law being enacted.
In the foreign student / staff restriction, the mandate only applies to Harvard, there is no specific civil or criminal violation being cited by the federal government that triggered the decision, and there is punishment (loss of enrollment, loss of staff, chaos that could further reduce enrollments of other students not interested in attending a university being crippled by limits on its students and faculty) being inflicted on a single entity.
In the Apple case, the firm has broken no law by manufacturing products in a foreign country, the threatened tariffs would be assigned solely to Apple's products and would obviously uniquely impair Apple's profits versus competitors.
The last time America was subjected to the rule of someone who had gone this King George while in power, well… We called it for what it was, wrote a firm but mostly polite eff you note and spent the next five years fighting and dying to shed the yoke of a tyrant and establish more just (not perfectly just, of course) control of our own affairs.
Two hundred and forty nine years later, Americans are in EXACTLY the same predicament as 1776. We somehow elected a President who has chosen to rule by fiat – DESPITE having majority control of every lever of the federal government – and in words and actions violates multiple constitutional protections on a DAILY basis. And the party in majority control refuses to use any of the powers available to it in the Legislative Branch to remove the threat posed by the President.
The actions being taken by Trump don't involve complex, esoteric gray areas in Constitutional law reflecting competing goals favoring the individual that occasionally come into conflict. These issues involve core constitutional limits protecting ALL individuals from gross abuses of power by a single person. Even in a hair-triggered, nuclear-tipped ICBM world, no President requires or deserves the level of power Trump is attempting to claim for himself. And whether he gets it or not, NOTHING GOOD has ever resulted from any individual attempting to concentrate this much power over the rest of us.
