A Time for Saying No
Dreaming of a bright future is tomorrow’s task. Now is a time for opposition.
A friend pointed out to us that Bill’s facetious conversation between Trump and Bannon in yesterday’s issue couldn’t possibly have been intercepted by the NSA under FISA Section 702. We appreciate the attention to detail and acknowledge that it’s a fair point: The NSA only targets foreigners, regardless of what legal authority they use.
It would be completely illegal for the NSA to intercept the communications of the president with any American. The only way Trump could make himself subject to that kind of collection would be if, when he was a private citizen, he had regular contact with shady foreigners.
Happy Friday.
The Value of a Negative Vision
by William Kristol
Saying “No” is underrated.
This is probably true about life in general, IMHO. But I’ll let others deal with life in general. That’s too deep a topic for us mere Morning Shots types. We just do politics. And in politics, a kind of negative capability is underrated.
What do I mean? Well, in politics, in my experience, you’re often told this: You really need to have a positive vision for the future. You can’t just be against things. You’ve got to be upbeat, aspirational, inspiring.
To which I’m inclined to say: Bah humbug.
I’m not denying the power of positive thinking. I remember as a kid hearing Robert Kennedy (Sr.) paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” Even to a cold-hearted young conservative like me, this was stirring, even inspiring.
And young conservatives circa 1970 also had their dreams. Bill Buckley chose to call a book of essays by conservative thinkers that he edited, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?—taking the title of a popular 1930s song.
But I’ve got to say, after all these years, I’ve found it’s pretty unusual to see a dream walking.
And I’ll also admit this: We conservatives wanted to believe that we were energized by a dream. We wanted to think that we’d been convinced of the case for conservativism by studying Burke or reading Hayek. But what really moved us, our truest and strongest motivation, was a loathing for the Communist regimes we saw abroad, accompanied by a distrust of the American left here at home.
Which was fine! Communist tyranny was terrible. The American left was often foolish.
It was perfectly reasonable to take one’s bearings from despising what was repulsive and fighting what was wrong or dangerous.
It’s true that the case for liberal democracy is complicated. But the case against fascism and communism is simple. You didn’t have to work out all the issues and challenges of liberalism to be a strong anti-fascist in the 1930s and an anti-Communist in the 1960s. It was the right thing to do.
Which brings us to 2025.
It’s right to be disgusted when you see Donald Trump demonizing law-abiding immigrants and Elon Musk praising the Alternative für Deutschland. It’s right to be repulsed by the stupidity and the cruelty of their policies. It’s right to be appalled by their admiration for dictators. It’s right to be repelled by the racists who flock to them, like the new acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy, Darren Beattie (who once said that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work”), and key DOGE staffer (until yesterday) Marko Elez (who boasted, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”).
It’s right to say “no” to all that. It’s reasonable to make saying no to all that the first principle of our politics. It would be nice to be able to see a dream walking. But that’s for tomorrow. For today, it’s urgent to say no to our looming nightmare.
Programming note: Bill and Sarah will go live on Sunday at noon ET to chat with you about the week in news. An alert will go out at noon via email and the Substack app letting you know where to watch. We’ll post the replay on the site, too.
Save the Data
by Martyn Wendell Jones
When Jefferson and Juliana McMillan-Wilhoit received an alert last Friday morning that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s webpage dedicated to the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) had been taken offline, they knew they had to move quickly.
The McMillan-Wilhoits are the founders of Flourish and Thrive Labs, a consulting firm that works with state and local public health departments on technology implementation and strategic planning. They were aware that they were likely seeing the beginning of the CDC’s attempt to meet the imminent deadline of President Donald Trump’s executive orders requiring government agencies to scour any trace of DEI or “gender ideology.” Jefferson and a colleague started searching out and downloading as many of the agency’s datasets as they could.
“At that point, the CDC website was still up and working, so we were able to download a lot of data before the outage,” he told The Bulwark. A file transfer protocol site where most of the data was stored remained up after the agency’s public-facing webpages went down, Juliana added, which extended the window for them to save the data.
“People didn’t know that FTP site exists, because if you’re not in the research world, you have no reason to know it exists,” Jefferson said. But it wasn’t long before even that site was taken down. The McMillan-Wilhoits believe around 1,000 CDC-related pages ended up going dark in the wake of Trump’s orders. The New York Times estimates around 3,000 pages disappeared.
Flourish and Thrive Labs was ultimately able to preserve about ten datasets, some of which contain decades’ worth of raw data. The recovered material includes vital statistics, immunization information, the YRBSS, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the National Health Interview Survey, and other sources, many of which still turn up “404” page-not-found error messages on the agency’s website.
“All of this data, beyond being publicly available for reasons of transparency, is essential for public health programming,” Jefferson said. Health departments across the country rely on it to do community health improvement planning, and without access to the agency’s studies and surveys, making those plans becomes virtually impossible.
Normally, Jefferson said, the CDC enables public health professionals to keep track of the progress of seasonal diseases like the flu and RSV almost in real time, with information being updated daily or weekly. That service helps them respond quickly to changes in the environment.
“We may have to pivot how we’re vaccinating, or pivot our prevention efforts,” he said. When those tools disappear, “we can’t do that with enough time to make any difference.”
“The impact for public health and healthcare providers is huge,” Juliana said. “This is really impacting local public health systems.”
Having copies of the raw datasets has also made it possible for the McMillan-Wilhoits’ firm to begin assessing the scope of changes that have been made to the curated data files being restored to the CDC website since the blackout. The primary change they’ve been able to detect so far in these restored files—which represent the aggregations of raw data that make higher-level trends across populations visible—is that variable labels for “gender” have been switched to “sex,” reflecting the demands set out in Trump’s executive order targeting “gender identity.” But the fact that these variable labels were changed in the curated data files means those files were “touched” during the blackout—which is to say, it creates the possibility that there could be underlying data-level modifications, as well.
“I would only trust the raw data, because during the outage, I can’t guarantee that any of the data wasn’t changed” in files where variable labels were switched, Jefferson said.
Given the importance of the data Flourish and Thrive Labs recovered, the firm has been making it available to state and local health departments, many of which are in the middle of their health improvement planning cycles. There is no charge for access, but the McMillan-Wilhoits have refrained from making the data public or widely accessible. They were spooked by others who approached them for access seemingly with an intent to monetize it.
“This is vital data, and we want to make it available” to those who need it most, Juliana later wrote in an email. The couple plan on setting up a protected website where “anyone in state and local health” can access the recovered information, but in the meantime, they are inviting anyone who urgently needs it and works in public health to contact them at cdcdatarequest [at] fandtlabs.com.
Quick Hits
CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE: As the Trump/Musk administration dismantles USAID, there’s been a lot of attention—rightly—on the good America does for the world through the aid agency. The New York Times today reports on some of the good the aid recipients do for us, including by volunteering to test new medical therapies and devices.
Now, some of the people mid-way through experimental treatments are left in the lurch—with experimental treatments literally in them.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely. . . .
In interviews, scientists—who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media—described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm. . . .
The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of:
malaria treatment in children under age 5 in Mozambique
treatment for cholera in Bangladesh
a screen-and-treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi
tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa
nutritional support for children in Ethiopia
early-childhood-development interventions in Cambodia
ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan
an mRNA vaccine technology for H.I.V. in South Africa
THE KING OF DEBT: Remember when conservatives really cared about fiscal responsibility and the national debt? Seems like forever ago. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ran the numbers on Trump’s tax proposals and, yowza, that’s a lot of red ink:
In a closed-door meeting with House Leadership today President Trump reportedly outlined his tax priorities. According to press reports, they included extending the expiring pieces of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA); expanding the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction; enacting tax breaks for goods made in America; cutting taxes on income from tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits; and eliminating tax breaks for carried interest and stadium owners.
Depending on the details of these proposals, our rough estimate is that a package of this nature would:
Reduce revenue by $5.0 trillion to $11.2 trillion over ten years.
Lower revenue by 1.3 to 3.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Boost debt to between 132 and 149 percent of GDP by 2035, if not offset, compared to nearly 100 percent today and 118 percent under current law.
Such a package could also lead to significant income shifting and tax avoidance, weaken the Medicare and possibly Social Security trust funds, dramatically boost interest costs, and increase the risk of a debt spiral.
Trump wants to cut taxes, clearly. But he also wants to keep spending like Louis XIV, who supposedly dismissed his profligacy with the phrase, “Après moi, le déluge.” Honestly, we’d be lucky to get to the “après” part at this point.
WHAT’S THE HARM IN HUMORING HIM?: Trump’s ridiculous plan to depopulate Gaza and turn it into some kind of real-estate development was met with immediate rejection from the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Trump’s “favorite dictator,” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and even, more subtly, Trump’s own administration and staff.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, desperate to hold on to power to avoid corruption charges, mired in a war for which he has no apparent theory of victory, and dependent on his government’s right-wing factions for political survival, has endorsed Trump’s plan—kind of. CNN reports:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed US President Donald Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza, as Israel’s army was ordered to prepare plans for large numbers of Palestinians to leave the territory.
Trump’s plan triggered an enormous backlash, with leaders from the Middle East and beyond rejecting it as unworkable and illegal.
But Netanyahu insisted the plan—which Trump said would involve sending Gaza’s residents to neighboring countries and taking “long-term ownership” of the enclave—was a “remarkable idea.”
“The actual idea of allowing first Gazans who want to leave to leave, I mean, what is wrong with that?” he told Fox News Wednesday, adding that those who leave the strip “can come back.”
That idea—allowing voluntary emigration from Gaza and giving the United States responsibility for the long-term government of the territory—has obvious appeal to the Israeli leader, even if it’s slightly different from what Trump seems to have in mind.
Still, it’s odd that an Israeli would back such a scheme. Trump’s plan sounds an awful lot like the British Mandate for Palestine, against which Israel’s founders fought in a violent insurgency.
Cheap Shots
Saying “no” may ignite the spark of resistance, but it is insufficient to sustain the fire of a lasting movement. The peril of Trumpism is not merely its grotesque vulgarity, its institutional vandalism, or its authoritarian ambitions—it is that it flourishes in a vacuum, an abyss created by an opposition too often hesitant, too often reactionary, too often defined by what it resists rather than what it envisions. The dream may not be walking, but without it, politics devolves into a Sisyphean game of ideological Whac-A-Mole, endlessly batting down fresh manifestations of the same malignancies rather than erecting a structure in which such malignancies cannot thrive.
Yes, there must be an unflinching rejection of authoritarianism, of bigotry, of the unabashed corruption that defines Trump and his acolytes. History is not moved by negation alone. People do not sacrifice merely to extinguish tyranny; they sacrifice to build something in its place. They march not only against, but toward.
While you dismiss the American left as “foolish,” let’s note the reality—foolish or not, they were correct. They saw what conservatives refused to acknowledge: that the right was accelerating, in real time, from the erosion of democratic norms to the overt flouting of law, to the embrace of authoritarianism as a governing principle. They warned that a movement willing to gut the Voting Rights Act, to launder conspiracy theories into policy, and to excuse corruption as a virtue of strongman politics would not stop of its own accord. They saw the trajectory when conservatives still insisted that Trump was an aberration rather than an inevitability.
In this way, your argument risks being self-annihilating. A movement constructed solely in opposition—to Trumpism today, to communism in the past—invites an abyss of its own. The moment the immediate threat recedes, so too does the unifying principle. It is why Reagan followed Carter, why Trump followed Obama, and why, absent something affirmative and enduring, another demagogue will follow Trump.
So, yes, say no—say it emphatically, unequivocally, and without concession. But let that be only the prelude. Without an articulated vision of what ought to be, negation alone is a feeble dam against the tide. Otherwise, we resign ourselves to a perpetual cycle of reaction, forever defined not by what we stand for, but merely by what we stand against.
7:51 AM MST Addendum: One of my biggest frustrations with the 2024 Harris and Biden campaigns was that, while they rightly warned that democracy was on the line, they failed to prioritize the systemic reforms needed to protect it long-term and prevent future bad actors from exploiting the same weaknesses Trump exposed. They presented the why but never engaged with the how. This always made winning, at best, a stopgap. The cracks in the system were already visible, and without real action designed to safeguard democracy, it was only a matter of time before someone else stepped in to exploit them.
My walking dream: a country with more millionaires and no billionaires. A country where anyone can be rich--and many are, but no one can be an oligarch. All it would take to get there is an individual wealth cap set at $100M with every dollar of wealth above that level taxed at 100%. I ask why not? And then I remember, we live in a country full of bootlickers to billionaires who ask not what billionaires can do for them and instead ask what they can do for billionaires.