Amateur Hour Is Over

Senate Revolts, State Violence, and the End of the “Deal Maker” Myth

Good morning! If this reads a little breathless, that’s because it’s being written in the narrow gaps between Trump killing someone, invading something, seizing something, or declaring that laws, allies, and basic reality are optional suggestions. It is genuinely difficult to get meaningful work done when every 12–18 hours the federal government commits a fresh offense that would have ended a presidency in a saner era. There are days when the hardest part of this job isn’t analysis or synthesis; it’s just keeping the list straight.

What we’re watching is not chaos for chaos’s sake. It’s an accelerating system, one that relies on force, intimidation, and spectacle to compensate for collapsing legitimacy. Heather Cox Richardson put it plainly this week: fascism is not a vibe or an insult, it’s a governing structure. A small self-declared elite claims exclusive authority, rejects equality, fuses state power with business and militarized force, invents enemies to discipline the population, and demands that people believe what they are told rather than what they can see. That framework is now fully operational.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is the moment that framework snapped into public view. Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, wife, mother of three, poet, and neighbor, was shot dead by ICE agent Jonathan E. Ross during an immigration enforcement operation. Video evidence shows agents crowding her vehicle, attempting to force entry, and firing as she turned away and tried to leave. What followed was as telling as the shooting itself: federal officials refused to name the agent while immediately branding Good a “domestic terrorist,” falsely claiming she ran over an officer despite video showing otherwise. The FBI seized exclusive control of the investigation, cutting out Minnesota’s independent investigators, while the White House demanded the public accept a narrative contradicted by their own eyes.

Authoritarian systems don’t just use violence; they insist you deny it. They don’t merely centralize force; they centralize truth. Once that demand is made openly, once people are told to disbelieve what they can see with their own eyes, consent begins to fray.

Less than 24 hours later, the same script reappeared in Portland. Border Patrol agents shot two people outside a hospital during another immigration operation. Again, DHS claimed a vehicle was “weaponized,” and federal authorities asserted sole jurisdiction. Local officials openly rejected the federal account. Portland’s mayor said the quiet part out loud: there was a time we could take the federal government at its word, and that time is long past.

Inside Congress, the cracks are getting louder. The House passed a three-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies after centrist Republicans forced the bill to the floor over Speaker Mike Johnson’s objections using a discharge petition, a procedural mutiny so rare it practically comes with its own footnote in congressional history. Seventeen Republicans crossed leadership to vote with Democrats on ObamaCare of all things, because millions of constituents are staring down higher premiums and they know who will be blamed. The bill may die in the Senate, but that’s beside the point. Republican leadership lost control of the floor on the very law their party has spent 15 years trying to bury.

Then there was Thom Tillis, Republican senator, NATO hawk, and about as far from the resistance choir as one can get, rising on the Senate floor to publicly scold White House aide and vampire spawn Stephen Miller for proposing that the United States simply absorb Greenland like spare change rattling around in the imperial sofa. Tillis didn’t mince words. He called it amateurish, stupid, destabilizing, and constitutionally unserious. He reminded the chamber that NATO allies like Denmark shed blood for the United States after 9/11, that alliances are not decorative, and that staffers do not get to freelance imperial fantasies on cable news. When a sitting Republican senator is telling the White House that “amateur hour is over” and that people should lose their jobs, that is not intra-party messaging. We are talking elite defection.

That same shift showed up in the Senate in a smaller but telling way. Five years after Congress mandated a plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and after years of foot-dragging, litigation, and excuses, the Senate unanimously approved a resolution to finally install it. The measure was led by Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley and passed without dissent. It does not require House approval, neatly sidestepping Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that the plaque was somehow “not implementable.” Symbolic? Of course, but symbols matter, especially when they directly contradict the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to rewrite January 6 as a peaceful tourist outing and after Trump himself pardoned violent rioters at the start of his second term. By voting unanimously to honor the officers who protected them, senators were doing something increasingly rare: acknowledging a shared reality and quietly rejecting the lie that nothing happened that day.

While all of this is happening, the economic mythology continues to collapse under its own weight. Trump promised to rebuild the economy and lower costs “rapidly.” Instead, the U.S. added just 50,000 jobs in December, capping the weakest year of job growth since the pandemic. Employers added 584,000 jobs in 2025, compared with 2 million the year before. Grocery prices remain elevated. Egg prices are down from their earlier spikes, gravity is not a policy, but overall food costs are still higher than when Trump took office. The labor market isn’t crashing, it’s stalling, stuck in a “no hire, no fire” holding pattern while households feel squeezed and the White House pressures the Fed to clean up the mess with rate cuts.

Abroad, the same governing instinct applies. The U.S. is now in the process of seizing a fifth oil tanker in recent weeks as part of an escalating campaign to choke off Venezuelan oil exports. It’s seizure replacing negotiation, interdiction standing in for strategy. If Trump were truly the legendary deal maker he claims to be, force would be his last resort. Instead, it’s his default setting. He doesn’t negotiate; he threatens. When that fails, he escalates. Deals require recognizing that other parties have agency. This administration does not believe that, at home or abroad.

And looming over all of it, rising quite literally out of the rubble of the East Wing, is Trump’s new White House ballroom: a roughly 90,000-square-foot monument to ego, hierarchy, and spectacle, designed before reviews were completed, justified with hand-waving about “top secret” work, funded by billionaire donors, and designed to overshadow the building it attaches to. There is no better visual metaphor for this presidency: austerity for everyone else, grandeur for the ruler, and absolute contempt for process.

Just in case anyone was tempted to believe the adults were still in charge somewhere, France has quietly delayed this year’s G7 summit to avoid a scheduling conflict with the White House hosting a cage fight on Trump’s birthday. Yes, really. Emmanuel Macron’s government shifted the summit dates after Trump announced that the South Lawn would host a “big UFC fight” on June 14, Flag Day, Trump’s 80th birthday, and apparently now also Thunderdome Day. Rather than force world leaders to choose between global economic coordination and watching Dana White set up an octagon at the executive mansion, France moved the G7 back a day. Officially, Paris says the change was merely the result of “consultations with G7 partners.” Unofficially, the world’s leading democracies are rearranging their calendars around a president who thinks hosting cage fighting at the White House is statesmanship. If you’re looking for a metaphor for America’s collapsing diplomatic credibility, it’s a pay-per-view event on the South Lawn.

Taken together, this is a single accelerating system. Force replacing legitimacy, and spectacle replacing governance. Yet, and this matters, it is also a system starting to wobble. Republicans are breaking ranks, mayors are refusing deference, senators are asserting co-equal power, and voters are souring. The administration is escalating because persuasion no longer works.

Obviously, this makes this moment in time especially dangerous, but it is also when pressure matters. History is unambiguous on this point: authoritarian systems don’t collapse because they are shamed, they crack when consent erodes and institutions stop cooperating. That process is exhausting to witness in real time, and equally demoralizing to document.

So yes, it would be nice if Trump could stop killing, invading, seizing, or kidnapping something for a day or two so the rest of us could catch our breath and do some actual work. But, even though he has already departed for another taxpayer funded golfing weekend in Mar-a-Lago, that seems unlikely, the work now is what it has always been in moments like this: naming what’s happening, refusing to normalize it, and applying pressure where it actually counts. That means non-violent disruption, mass civic action like strikes, general, rolling, sectoral, until accountability is no longer optional. Democracies don’t survive on polite objections alone; they survive when ordinary people withdraw their consent in disciplined, collective ways and force power to respond. This is how we show the rest of the world what real Americans are made of, not chaos, not cruelty, but solidarity, resolve, and the refusal to cooperate with a system that has chosen violence over legitimacy. We must lean into it together.

And so we end where we can. Marz is still joining me each night for our moonbeam vigils, standing watch in the dark like it’s a job and someone has to do it. I bought a stronger torch, not because it changes anything materially, but because it felt like my intentions needed a few more lumens. Some nights all you can do is bear witness, keep the light steady, and refuse to look away. From our rainy little enclave on the Southern Oregon Coast, sending love, resolve, and as much peace as this moment will allow to all of you. Hold the line. We’re still here.