Jim Crow with GPS
The Supreme Court eyes the Voting Rights Act, Kushner eyes Gaza, and the odds of Trump lasting the term keep shrinking.
Good morning! The empire of illusion never sleeps, it just changes costume. Yesterday, Donald Trump’s foreign-policy doppelgängers, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, swept into Gaza in crisp shirts and mirrored sunglasses, guided by Israeli officers and a U.S. admiral who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. Officially, it was a “post-conflict stabilization tour.” Unofficially, it was a real-estate inspection, the kind you do when you’re planning to rebuild what your friends helped level.
They called it a “civil-military coordination center,” a mouthful of bureaucratic frosting hiding a simple fact: the operation will be run from Israel, not Gaza. Two hundred U.S. military planners, engineers, and “security experts” will soon set up camp across the border to “monitor the cease-fire” and “coordinate humanitarian aid”, a noble way to say they’ll watch from afar as Gazans pick through the rubble themselves.
Kushner, who parlayed his time in government into a Saudi-funded $2 billion investment fund, is suddenly back to “help.” It’s the same man whose “Abraham Accords” turned the Middle East into a boutique of transactional diplomacy. Now he returns to the scene of the crime with a camera crew and a borrowed moral compass. The optics are breathtaking: a billionaire’s son-in-law striding across ash-gray streets while the people of Gaza rebuild their homes with buckets and grief. If colonialism ever needed a LinkedIn post, this would be it.
Back home, Trump’s other project, the militarization of dissent, is running into something he can’t bulldoze: the courts. In Illinois, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that National Guard troops can remain federalized but cannot be deployed while litigation continues. Translation: they can polish their boots, not march on Chicago. The ruling is a partial win for democracy and a full rebuke to Trump’s fantasy of sending troops into blue cities to “restore order,” otherwise known as punish the ungrateful.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul called it a victory “for communities who speak truth to power,” while twenty other states filed an amicus brief declaring Trump’s power grab “unlawful, unconstitutional, and undemocratic.” The Founders would probably call it “exactly what we warned you idiots about.” Judge April Perry, who first blocked the deployment, was blunt: there is no rebellion in Illinois, no emergency, only a president playing soldier with other people’s children.
So the generals stay idle while the grifters fly to Gaza. It’s a perfect metaphor for Trumpism: projection abroad, repression at home, and a perpetual state of theater holding the seams together. But if you think this week’s theme is overreach, wait until Monday, when the Supreme Court convenes to consider whether racial gerrymandering should even be illegal anymore.
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, could dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the clause that stops politicians from carving minority voters out of existence. According to a new report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund, if the Court guts Section 2, Republicans could redraw up to nineteen House seats in their favor. That’s enough to cement a permanent majority and to erase nearly a third of the Congressional Black Caucus in one stroke of a pen.
LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter warned that such a ruling would “clear the path for a one-party system where power serves the powerful and silences the people.” The South would see its remaining Democrats vanish like humidity after a storm, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, all bleached clean of opposition. Historians have a word for this kind of “race-neutral redistricting.” It’s spelled J-I-M C-R-O-W, but now it comes with GIS software and an algorithmic smile.
Fair Fight’s Lauren Groh-Wargo isn’t waiting for eulogies. She’s urging Democrats to “play offense, redraw maps wherever possible, take back Congress, and hold this corrupted Court accountable.” She’s right. The Roberts Court has been playing constitutional Jenga for years; Section 2 is just the next block to pull before the whole thing topples into minority rule.
Amid all the grim arithmetic, a flicker of gallows humor: across the Atlantic, one commentator confessed he’d placed a £100 bet that Donald Trump won’t make it to the end of his term. Not out of wishful thinking, but because even the bookies can smell decay. The odds have already shortened from fifteen-to-eight to six-to-four, meaning the market now believes what the White House denies, the strongman is weakening.
The official line is that Trump suffers from “chronic venous insufficiency,” which sounds more like a metaphor than a diagnosis. It supposedly explains the purple hands, the missing days, the drooping mouth, the half-slurred sentences. But nothing explains away the smell of rot in his own ranks. Pam Bondi, once his loyal legal shield, now looks like she’s studying old Watergate footage for exit strategies. Anthony Scaramucci, briefly head of communications, calls his ex-boss “the Wicked Witch of the West Wing.” And like that witch, Trump is shrinking under exposure to water, sunlight, and truth.
The economy is faltering, tariffs are backfiring, vaccines are vanishing, and Trump’s approval rating just hit a new historic low: minus 16 points, the worst for any sitting president this far into a term. The once-adoring youth vote has fled. Even Vice President J.D. Vance, captured in archival clips calling Trump “an idiot” and “a racist demagogue,” must hear the faint hum of the 25th Amendment warming up backstage.
The Atlantic put it best: Trump is “a man racing upward on a downward-moving escalator.” The escalator, as it happens, is speeding up. Whether it’s impeachment, resignation, incapacity, or simple physics, the descent looks inevitable.
So as Kushner smiles for the cameras in Gaza and the Supreme Court sharpens its knives, remember that even in this dystopian pageant, entropy still works. Empires decay. Bets pay out. And somewhere in London, a bookmaker is quietly rooting for democracy.
I’m not a real doctor but my diagnosis is “chronic moral deficiency complicated by chronic lack of acceptable ethos”. No vaccine for either. I’ve heard the prognosis is not good. It all starts showing up as rotting hands and swollen cankles before spreading to garbled speech and total confusion……Looks like we’re already at Stage 5.
As usual Mary, you strike at the heart of things. Thanks. My following riff springs from your comments.
“…only a president playing soldier with other people’s children.” Truer words were never spoken. By contrast to Trump’s bellicosity, President Eisenhower commented “ “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” In the domestic, we have Kent State in our history. In the midst, Speaker Mike Johnson et al joining the Man Who Would Be King characterizing a legitimate protest as “haters of America.” The Kent State students were denigrated as such. The young guardsmen felt threatened. The conditions are ripening. I hope our courts remain strong.
In this theme, God save the Republic if the SCOTUS guts the VRA. To disenfranchise, potentially, so many Americans will reopen the events leading to its creation. Except. We have no MLK. If the Right thinks “woke” is bad, a population with their essential civic right—the vote & representation—cancelled will remind them what “woke” is about. We narrowly avoided greater crisis in the sixties. Unfortunately, those of us who recall vividly are greying out.
In the end, it is greed. So our emissaries are Kushner and Witkoff. Pretty cool. In the last episode of the Qatari Jet with the Classic Bordello trim, Qatar gets a base in Idaho. In Gaza, a Trump Hotel on the Med, and Israel the West Bank.