Last Guest Post of this series: Reform the Supreme Court

I return to regular posting on Monday.

(We get by with a little help from our friends.)

                              ---------

A Quinnipiac poll found that just 33 percent of voters approve of how the Supreme Court is handling its job.

Gallup is publishing charts showing it:

College classmate Erich Almasy is writing about it. 

While I am at the 55th reunion of my college class of 1971, I am sharing guest posts by classmates. I want time to visit the stacks of Widener Library, go to the south side of the fourth floor, where I will return to a place where I am surrounded by books shelved under the subject U.S. History. I expect to find my favorite wooden cubicle, the one with a window looking down on the Wigglesworth dorm. Four years ago, it was there. You can't go home again. Home changed: people got old, parents died, old girlfriends moved away and married. But that study cubicle in the Widener stacks has been unchanged for 60 years so far. 

After graduation Erich Almasy went to Harvard Business School, then had a long career on the consultancy/business management track. He and his classmate wife, Cynthia Blanton, live in Mexico.

College Graduation photo

Erich Almasy and wife Cynthia Blanton

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

How did we get to this place of politicized justice, not for all but for a minority of White people? The original Judiciary Act of 1789, which accompanied the Constitution, called for six Justices. A majority of Congress, composed of the opposing party, tried to limit President Thomas Jefferson’s ability to fill an empty seat and reduced the number to five in 1801. After the year 1807, when his party regained the majority, Jefferson shepherded an increase to seven to accommodate new Western circuits. Then, in 1837, under President Martin Van Buren, the additional circuits in the south and west led Congress to expand the court to nine. Congress added one court member in 1863 so that President Abraham Lincoln could have an anti-slavery majority and bypass the racist chief justice, Roger Taney, who was responsible for the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Congress bounced the court to seven in 1866 and back to nine justices in 1869, where it has remained.

 

The most famous (infamous) effort to change the court’s numbers occurred during FDR’s presidency. Seeing some of his New Deal legislation thwarted by a conservative majority, Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of justices to fifteen. The court caved on Roosevelt’s demands, and its size remained the same. And while this was known as “packing,” it actually represented a throwback to the original court concept, where justices rode circuits (until 1891) and the court increased its number as the country grew and needed more circuits. The number of district courts has remained static at 94 for several decades, with the March 2025 Judicial Conference of the United States recommending the creation of 69 new district courts to address the overloaded system. The number of circuits has remained constant at 13 since 1982. The same conference recommended two new circuits because the present annual workload exceeds 3,300 decisions.

 

The number of Supreme Court justices has always been fluid, expanding with the country’s growth. The determination of its size has also been quite political, changing for partisan reasons on four occasions. A court of fifteen would be able to deal with the present severe overload (exacerbated by a certain administration’s demands for emergency relief) and would spread out the ages and political leanings of justices with appointments spread over several administrations. A larger court would also help reduce the disturbingly large number of shadow docket decisions, where no written opinion exists and “irreparable harm” allows the court to take immediate action. Sounding suspiciously like the 15th-century English Court of the Star Chamber, which secretly punished people the King didn’t like, shadow dockets take action without judging the merits of a case. They are essentially unsigned short orders that the court traditionally used only to delay a death penalty execution. Now they are non-transparent decisions with no accountability. During Biden’s four years, there were 19 shadow docket cases. So far, the Trump administration has filed 34 in sixteen months. One of the most recent decisions allowed Trump to implement his Executive Order, forcing all “trans” people out of the military. The irreparable harm done here was clearly to the people fired, and the emergency, like so many of Trump’s, was fictional.

 

Toward the end of the Biden term, a report on proposed reforms to the Supreme Court, which took three years to produce, was issued. No one has looked at it since. It suggested term limits of 18 years, a measure that 67% of Americans support. It established a binding code of conduct, ethics, and conflict-of-interest policies for Justices. It suggested increasing the number of Justices to speed case evaluation and resolution. If Americans have any hope of seeing realistic campaign finance laws, reversal of presidential immunity, a right to abortion, gun registration, restraints on the Christian religion in schools, and the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act, then major Supreme Court reform is a “must have.” The judiciary of the United States is in a perilous state. Courts are jammed, and a speedy trial is a fantasy. Unaccountable decisions that cannot be understood as precedent by lower courts are becoming widespread. The most political court in nearly 170 years is running roughshod over American law and precedent. It’s time for a massive change.

 

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I will be back on Monday

I will have comments on the Iran war, Harvard’s resistance to Trump, and the results of a survey of the graduating class of 1971.

We mostly got rich. Some got really rich. Nearly all of us enjoyed our careers. Most of us have not downsized our homes yet. All of us have a little something wrong with our health. Some of us died. We all got old at about the same pace. 

Guest Post: How Universities Die

Guest Post: Institutions are fragile. And precious.

My classmates and I attended college in the late 1960s, a time of disruption at universities. 

The Vietnam War was underway and most of us opposed it. It was the proverbial joy and the curse of "living in interesting times."

I was mostly a bystander during disruptive campus activity. I didn't go on strike and skip classes, and I didn't occupy any buildings. I was paying dearly for those classes; I wanted my money's worth. I didn't think making trouble at college was going to end the Vietnam War any sooner.  Quite the opposite. President Nixon loved criticizing those students he characterized as privileged snobs with their long hair and bad attitudes. I fought that stereotype, so by the standards of the time, I was clean cut.

While I am at my 55th college reunion I am posting a week-long series of guest columns by classmates. Tony Farrell was unusual. He did not protest ROTC on campus. He was a member of ROTC. After college he entered the Navy. He had a long career in marketing for The Gap, The Sharper Image, and The Nature Company. 

Farrell, 1975, getting his Lieutenant boards

Farrell with wife Kathy, daughter Morgen, and their new rescue dog.

Guest Post by Tony Farrell 

Assaults On Harvard, 1969 and Today
“The Most Unbelievable Thing”

My Harvard Class of 1971 has its 55th reunion this June. One panel session is inspired by the article “This Is How Universities Die” by William Kirby, a China expert and historian of the modern research university. Borrowing some of Kirby’s language in a flattering way, here’s the session description: Is This How Universities Die?

Harvard’s principled resistance to assaults on its academic freedom and institutional autonomy has affirmed the university’s world-leadership as nothing else could. Cambridge, 2026, is not (yet) Berlin, 1933, or Beijing, 1950, but Trump's attacks are no less dangerous. Fortunately, America retains an independent judiciary and the rule of law. And it has, in Harvard, a powerful institution with the history, will and resources to resist. But if Harvard fails, we may witness the destruction of the singular realm—higher education—in which the U.S. is foremost. If American universities remain the envy of the world in 2026, the question must be: For how long?

There’s some irony here because in 1969 (spring of our sophomore year) some classmates and other students—protesting the Vietnam War and ROTC on campus—seized University Hall, the main administration building in Harvard Yard. We aging alums are now much older than those harried deans ushered out of their offices. The maligned    President Pusey ordered state troopers to forcibly remove the student occupiers the next day, at dawn; a violent event memorialized as “the bust.”

Then as now, the question is the same: Can universities be destroyed in this way? By protesting students or authoritarian governments?

The week following “the bust,” Harvard’s faculty and administrators debated what had happened and what to do, as recounted in Roger Rosenblatt’s 1997 book “Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969.” At the time, Rosenblatt was a young English instructor. “Several faculty members,” he wrote, “were European Jews who had fled the Nazis and had come to American universities only 20 years earlier. . . .They had a much greater understanding of the fragility of institutions.”
“That day’s most stirring speech,” he continued, “came from Alexander Gershenkron, professor of economics, one of Harvard’s many European refugee professors, and who spoke out of that experience.”

Gershenkron began: “I am not a Pollyanna. I know quite well there are things that are horribly wrong with the United States; but I also know there are many things that are wonderfully right. Amongst those are the great universities, and among them is Harvard. There’s nothing comparable; there’s no counterpart anywhere in the world. To try to destroy, to disrupt, to attack this University is criminal. They attack the University simply because it is in their proximity, just as a criminal steals something just because it is lying there. And in attacking the University, they attack the finest flower of American culture.”

He continued: “‘The Most Unbelievable Thing’ is a fairy tale by Han Christian Andersen which, in the dark days of the Nazi occupation, the Danes used so effectively. There was a king and a princess. The king was interested in the progress of the arts, and announced he would give the princess in marriage to the man who would accomplish the most unbelievable thing. 

“And there was great excitement and tremendous competition in the land. Finally, the great day came when all the prepared works were presented for judgment. There were many marvelous things, but towering high above them was a truly wonderful thing. It was a clock, produced by a handsome young man. It had the most wonderful mechanism, showing calendar, back-and-forth, into the past and into the future; showing the time; and around the clock were sculpted all the great spiritual and intellectual figures in the history of mankind.

“Whenever the clock struck, those figures exercised most graceful movements. Everybody—the people and the judges—said that, Yes, to accomplish a thing like that was most unbelievable. The princess looked at the clock and then the handsome young man, and she liked them both very much. The judges were about to pronounce their formal judgment when a new competitor appeared, a lowbrow fellow. He carried a sledgehammer, walked up to the clock and smashed it. Everybody said, Why, to smash up such a clock, this is surely the most unbelievable thing. And that was how the judges had to adjudge. . . . ”

Gershenkron concluded: “I can only hope this faculty will rise and smash up all the criminal nonsense that’s going around the campuses of the country. This university—like the clock in the story, like all great works of art—is a frail and fragile creation. And unless you do something about it, this wonderful work of art will be destroyed, and the guilt will be yours.”

In 1969, the appeals of Gershenkron and fellow like-minded European professors were voted down by the faculty: No student protesters were criminally charged (a few were expelled), but Harvard was not destroyed.

Today, the assaults on the university by the government are more serious, potentially consequential, perhaps even existential. We will see how “frail and fragile” the university might be.

Fight fiercely, Harvard.

 

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Guest Post: The perfect word for Trump 2.0

Bad, Worse, Worst.

The English language has words for presidents like Donald Trump.

Maybe we need new and better ones.

While I am at the 55th reunion of my college class of 1971, I am sharing guest posts by classmates. John Shutkin was a lawyer on the "Big Law" track before he segued into a practice as general counsel for international accounting firms. 

In college, and still, he played with words.

Guest Post by John Shutkin

The Perfect Word for Trump 2.0

I have discovered, every now and then and much to my delight, that a “perfect word” exists: one that exactly describes some phenomenon that I am already familiar with and yet I previously had to describe in many words. And, in some instances, it is not until I have learned this word that I even realized that what is described was a “thing.”

A perfect example of this perfect word is “frenemy.” I first heard this word about twenty years ago, and etymology suggests that, although it actually lurked in the English language for more than a hundred years before, it was popularized by “Sex and the City” early in this century. And I immediately realized how it exactly described a few complicated relationships that I had had over the years, starting with a close friend/rival of mine through elementary and high school (I got into Harvard; he didn’t) and including one of my close colleagues at my original law firm out of law school. (He made partner; I didn’t.)

So, too, the first time I heard the word “humblebrag,” I knew exactly what it meant and had a similar “Aha! moment” recounting how many times I had witnessed it with well-known public speakers, typically when they received awards. And, indeed, I had from time to time heard someone say (not to me, of course), “Stop sounding so humble. You’re not that great.” But here the concept was encapsulated into one perfect word. Merriam-Webster 

More felicitously, I remember learning the term “gemütlich” when my father married my stepmother, who was German. For the uninformed, this is what it means: a state or feeling of warmth, friendliness,and good cheer, as described in Wikipedia. I immediately realized, happily, that one didn’t have to be German to have enjoyed such a warm and cozy moment or atmosphere.

But what has this got to do with Trumpian politics? I shall explain. I just read a Substack post by Paul Krugman entitled “The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance” -- a typically excellent Krugman piece, and a nice title. But, based on other things I have read in the past year, I realized that there is, in fact, a perfect word for that title and, more generally, for Trump 2.0: “kakistocracy.”

AI defines “kakistocracy” thusly:

“Kakistocracy is a system of government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Derived from the Greek words kákistos (worst) and krátos (rule), it describes a state where incompetence, corruption, and unethical behavior dominate leadership. The term has been used in political commentary to highlight dysfunctional, unprincipled governance.”

Ring a bell? Anyone? Per Wikipedia, kakistocracy – or, more specifically, the term for it -- has been around since the 17th Century; however, it was a new one to me. 

In college, a group of us, after a long night of partying, decided that we wanted to coin a new word for “cool” – we felt “cool” was overused and hated “boss” and “gear” – and then see if we could somehow make it become part of the popular vernacular. We decided that “nitro” was our perfect word. We obviously failed miserably, unless one includes some fairly recent commercial usages of it in the contexts of cold-brewed coffee and Shell gas.

But here is my humble (humblebrag?) proposal to those of us in the noble MAGA opposition. Let us embrace the term “kakistocracy” we refer to Trump 2.0. Maybe this perfect word will make it into the vernacular. As the cliché goes, “If the shoe fits….”

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Guest Post: Red diaper baby

"Teach your children well
Their father's hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by"

     Graham Nash, "Teach Your Children," 1968

While I am at my college's 55th reunion of the class of 1971, I am presenting guest posts by classmates. I wanted time to revisit old places where I formed permanent memories. I want go back to Emerson Hall, where presidential scholar Richard Neustadt told us in 1967 that JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly brought a nuclear war in 1962, and that LBJ was that very week deciding to escalate the war in Vietnam. 

Classmate Rod Kessler's guest post is a reflection on the politics and values he learned from his father. I don't have a photo of the dinner-table conversations my family had about school budget elections. I do have this photo of my father, teaching my brother and me how to grow melons.

Rod Kessler told me he enjoyed his 31-year career in the English Department of Salem State University, where he taught writing classes and workshops, as well as courses on the history of the English language and on grammar and style. While his book Off in Zimbabwe won the Associated Writing Program's annual award for a short story collection back in 1984, his 600-plus page novel, Edelman, Unsung, was deemed lacking in commercial appeal, and remains unpublished. His most recent work is Self-Portrait with Trees, a book of poems. 

Irving Kessler, 86. Rod Kessler, 60

Irving Kessler, 92. Rod Kessler, 66

Guest Post by Rod Kessler

Thinking about my thinking -- and yours.

Imagine posing this question to a ten-year-old: Suppose a hard-working cab driver has eight children and a hard-working doctor has only two children. Shouldn't the cab driver earn more than the doctor?

My father, a dedicated Communist, didn't hesitate to ask me that. One is never too young, he probably assumed, to hear, "To each according to his need; from each according to his ability" [Note: The cabbie and the doc were both hard-working.] As it happens, it was my big brother who received the brunt of my father's political teaching; unlike him, I didn't read The Communist Manifesto as a sixth grader. I escaped the heavy indoctrination. Lucky me.

Today I'm a liberal—a typical well-educated, white-haired, septuagenarian Massachusetts Trump-hating progressive, but I'm no Communist, no true believer. I vote for Democrats. That said, I haven't escaped parental influence. My parents regarded religion as the opiate of the masses and raised us accordingly. I'm an atheist to this day.

What's on my mind is how we Americans come to the stands we take that define us— but also that divide us. Most obviously, we bear the stamp of our parentage, not that this stamp is necessarily determinative. But if I had been the child of Republican evangelicals, might I be cheering Donald on and hoping to keep mifepristone out of the mail? What proportion of the electorate votes for the same party as Dad? What percentage of Americans prays in the church of Mom (or shares her disdain for praying at all)?

What's maybe more pernicious and pervasive than how our parents voted and prayed are the often-unarticulated cultural messages we absorbed as kids—the taken-for-granted truths that are never put into words. One such message in my back pages is that it's the government's role to provide for all its citizens. The government is like an extended family, and we're all in this together. Just as a good parent will sacrifice and provide for children, so must every good citizen contribute to everyone's welfare.

You know the saying, Fish are the last to discover the existence of water? That conception of government was the water I was swimming in.

Other people grew up in a very different ocean, I've learned. At Salem State University, I occasionally had students so gifted and so qualified that they could easily have been accepted at campuses far more elite and selective. But they came to our campus because it was the least costly, explaining that their families insisted that they pay their own way once they turned 18. The world didn't owe them a living, they believed and they'd be better people if they didn't rely on handouts (including government handouts).

There are plenty of people out there whose tacit understanding of government is of a mistrustful "they," not of a communal "us." We'd be better off, they take for granted, if Uncle Sam stayed off everyone's back so that industrious, enterprising souls could succeed in life. According to their world view, that cabbie, if he couldn't pay his bills, shouldn't have produced so many children in the first place and maybe he should have gone to medical school himself!

The point I'm hoping to make is that the political viewpoints that we consciously espouse and the values we uphold might derive from perspectives or schema so taken for granted, so internalized, that we're unaware of their power. Consider: What truths do you unconsciously assume are self-evident? I'm sure racial attitudes fall into this category, and so, too, probably the gender roles some consider "natural."

If we could somehow stand apart from ourselves and, like that fish that finally discovers the existence of water, start to perceive our preconceptions, maybe our confrontations with one another would be more civic, more productive. Maybe we could even start some rethinking.

My father died at the age of 98, still regarding Fidel as a hero (likewise Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie, Harry Belafonte, and—to give him his due—just about every composer of classical chamber music.) He never lost faith that the arc of history would ultimately bend toward social justice. I'm not sure these days if I'm optimistic enough to go along with that, but I hope we can grow wise enough in our divided nation to better understand where each of us, consciously or not, is coming from.

  

 

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Guest Post: Boomers need to let go.

By comparison with the Biblical patriarchs, we are led by young people.

-- Adam was 930

-- Seth was 912

-- Methuselah was 969

I am 76, and my college classmate Chuck Schumer will turn 76 in November.

Chuck Schumer

Erich Almasy looks at it in the other direction. In comparison with the population of the United States, we are led by very old people, who need to let go.

While at my college's 55th reunion of the class of 1971 I am presenting guest posts by classmates that they prepared the week ahead. I wanted to have them ready to publish during a busy week when I looked around and tried to notice what had changed. Back in the late-1960s the barber shops all closed. We didn't need haircuts. I will be curious to see if barber shops are back, and if so, what a haircut costs nowadays. [I just learned: $30, with an expected tip of $10.] Almasy rowed at college, went to Harvard Business School, then had a long career on the consultancy/business management track. He and his classmate wife, Cynthia Blanton, live in Mexico.

Erich Almasy ID photo for European hostels.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Changing of the Guard

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance” – a quote attributed to the playwright David Mamet, but probably much older. During the 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan pounced with his prepared zinger, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.” Proving at least that the Gipper could still remember his lines. At the time, Mondale was 56 and not exactly a spring chicken. Reagan was 71, and at the end of his two terms, came close to matching Biden and the current age frontrunner, Donald Trump. Reagan was not formally diagnosed with cognitive decline (nice word for dementia) until 1994, five years after leaving the White House. But as early as 1984 and by the end of his second term, Reagan was clearly showing the signs, like someone else we know. Back then, a Nancy Reagan/Ken Duberstein “bubble” wrapped the president, and his own ebullient personality and his polished delivery of completed policies let him avoid critical review of his health. Biden was unable to employ any of these subterfuges and was seen to be in decline. Neither president faced a real threat from the 25th Amendment, which empowers the Cabinet and Congress to force a president to resign.

At the start of the 119th Congress in January 2025, there were nearly 120 members of Congress aged 70 or older. More are Democrats than Republicans. The present number, which represents over a fifth of all members, includes:

· 86 members in the House of Representatives

· 33 members in the Senate.

· 24 members of Congress who are over the age of 80.

To my aging mind, we (and by that I mean Democrats) clearly need to reduce the average age of our leaders and quickly. The Vietnam Boomers must give way to the Iraq/Afghanistan Millennials. White men must give way to Hispanic, Black, and Asian men and women. It’s not because the oldsters have become irrelevant; it’s just not our future at stake. I still find value in the African proverb, "The youth walk faster, but the elderly know the road." Will it be possible to find a way for the party elders to step aside while the newcomers listen to sage advice and consult a road map? At 64, Obama is almost ready for Medicare, yet younger people still seem to value what he says. Not sure who else among senior Democrats has both a Yiddisher Kop (the “Jewish head” for street smarts and common sense) and acceptability. Can Maxwell Fish (28), James Talarico (36), Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (36), Graham Platner (40), and Bobby Pulido (55) find common ground with Peter and my classmate Chuck Schumer?

It won’t be easy, but the models for vigorous youth creating positive change are there, from Teddy Roosevelt at 42 and JFK at 43. They worked with senior advisers such as Elihu Root (56) and Henry Cabot Lodge (51) for Roosevelt, and W. Averell Harriman (69) and Maxwell Taylor (59) for Kennedy. Both Roosevelt’s Bully Pulpit and Kennedy’s Camelot were imperfect, but the former brought forth the Progressive Age, and the latter moved us beyond ourselves with the Peace Corps, the New Frontier, and the space program. Over 50 years passed between Roosevelt and Kennedy. Over 60 years have passed since JFK. We need a new, younger vision if we are to progress. It can be done, and it should be done.






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Guest Post: We destroyed USAID just in time for Ebola

Guest Post: How do you protect yourself when the government shuts down your department?

--  Get orders in writing.

--  Don't acquiesce to illegality.

--  Try to inform the people cutting you about the consequences of their actions.

While I am at my 55th college reunion I am posting a week-long series of guest posts by classmates. Sandford Borins moved with me and about 50 other men from Winthrop House, one of the classic dorms for men, to the less-fancy and less centrally-located women's dorms, as part of the co-education blending of all-male Harvard and all-female Radcliffe. It was a good semester. As Jan and Dean sang about Surf City, in the Radcliffe dorms it was two girls for every boy. It was nice to be around female students. In the late 1960s, Ivy League college presidents thought coeducation of men and women was risky. What about their endowments? What if the female students never had careers, never made big money, and never became multimillion dollar donors?

Sandy was a very able student. He followed an academic path and had a long career teaching public management at the University of Toronto. He is Canadian and has been writing guest posts about Canada's relationship to the U.S. He views the U.S. with dismay. This post was published last week at Sandy's own blog: sandfordborins.com.

Here, with a backdrop of his various diplomas, Sandy wears an old reunion T-shirt with a reference to the college president's opinion of our class:

Guest Post by Sandford Borins 

While the Trump Administration was destroying the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in February 2025, there was an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. One consequence was that USAID’s supply of 27,000 sets of personal protective equipment languished in a warehouse in Kenya and were never shipped to Uganda. We are now facing a much more severe outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and a more severe result of the erasure of USAID is that the US Government will play a much smaller role in any international response to an Ebola pandemic. As President Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”

Reasons for Rage

I became aware of the Ebola situation in 2025 by reading Nicholas Enrich’s rage-inducing memoir Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. To be clear, I feel sympathy for Enrich and his former colleagues at USAID, and fury about the Trump Administration’s destruction of the agency. Though this is not my government, Enrich’s book evokes my rage for two reasons. First, I believe that development assistance should be an important priority for the government of every wealthy country; erasing USAID greatly reduces the global level of development assistance and makes the Third World worse off. Second, while I accept that it is legitimate for governments to sunset programs and agencies that they feel are inconsistent with their priorities, I believe that such decisions should be made by the legislature after public debate. They should not be made by executive order and implemented by skullduggery.

Nicholas Enrich was a career public servant at USAID, a middle manager in the global public health area. His book is a detailed memoir of the 42 days after Trump’s inauguration when USAID was destroyed and his career as a public servant was terminated. The book reads like a perverse thriller, and I devoured it rapidly. Enrich paints acid portraits of the Trump Administration’s political appointees, who combined ignorance of global development and of USAID’s programs with malevolence towards its staff. The public servants oscillated between the belief that it was possible to persuade the political appointees of the value of USAID’s mission and programs and the belief that such a task was impossible, and the best course of action would be to join an amorphous resistance movement. Enrich forms a plan to resist the Administration, and suspense builds as we wonder whether he will be able to carry it off.

Lessons for Democracy

The book makes a significant contribution to the study of democratic backsliding by laying out in its epilogue the tactics the Trump Administration used to destroy an agency and a set of tactics career civil servants can use to resist in the bureaucracy, in the courts of law, and in the court of public opinion.

The Trump Administration’s tactics include telling lies about the agency and its staff to build public support, infiltrating and immobilizing the agency’s IT and financial systems (the work of DOGE), terminating external contracts (a powerful tactic against an agency like USAID that does its work through contracts), and vilifying and then firing staff. Though USAID was the first to fall, I’m sure this playbook was used for other agencies.

Enrich has a long list of tactics for career public servants who want to fight back. Here are a few that I think are most promising: making sure that all orders from political appointees are in writing; insisting on educating political appointees about the department and its programs; understanding in advance which orders would be within the law and which would not, and refusing to obey unlawful orders; and documenting and saving records of interactions with political appointees. I think Enrich’s advice will be essential to career public servants in the US as well as to those in other countries whose governments are emulating the Trump Administration.

It Can’t Happen Here

In Canada we are not faced with an assault on democratic values comparable to that of the Trump Administration. But there are many Canadians who are MAGA wannabes. Is this how they would like to see Canada or a province or city governed if they take office? Pierre Poilievre has made it clear that he thinks Canada spends too much on foreign aid. If he were elected, would he borrow from the Trump Administration playbook to achieve his desired outcome?

In a previous post, I asked whether Ontario, under the Ford Government, is still a democracy. My answer is that through tactics like use of the notwithstanding clause in the constitution, creation of special zones in which certain laws (especially those concerning the environment) do not apply, and limiting the powers of municipal governments, the Ford Government is making Ontario less democratic. Reading Enrich’s book has stimulated my thinking about how civil society can fight back.

Enrich’s book is a well-crafted memoir about public servants fighting back against an anti-democratic if not dictatorial political regime and a major contribution to the literature on democratic backsliding. It certainly should be of interest to Americans, where the Trump Administration is undertaking a full-fledged assault on democracy, and to citizens of other countries, where such an assault is a reasonable fear.

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