Editor’s note: Like every edition, today’s goes out to everyone on my list. That includes subscribers and people who read for free. I’m sending it to everyone because I believe I should. This is a newsletter about democracy and the common good, after all. I can’t be exclusive.

That said, I can’t do this alone. I need the good people who read for free to recognize the good work that I’m doing and support it in any way they can, whether that’s a subscription or a tip. The election drained some of my faith in democracy, but I still have faith in good people.

I hope you will join us today. Thanks! –JS

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As I lie in this bed overcoming whatever demon-hell kind of cold I have, I have been thinking about what it means for a president to dismantle the United States government as the rate that Donald Trump is, and I keep coming back to what a professor at the University of Texas at Austin said: 

“I can’t think of a faster way to undermine the country than simultaneously firing government workers, cutting scientific research, rolling back protections on public health and environment, and cutting essential services,” Josh Busby said last week. “It’s like the US was defeated in war and is being occupied by a hostile enemy.”

Every day since Busby posted this remark seems to have deepened the wisdom of it. The administration said last night that it would cut in half the 90,000 people who work at the Internal Revenue Service, right in the middle of tax season. The president issued on Tuesday an executive order falsely claiming the authority to shut down the US Department of Education. This morning, it was reported that the administration would cut 80,000 jobs at the Veterans Affairs Administration. 

Trump and his advisors say they are getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse. But even if that were the case, savings and efficiency wouldn’t come at the expense of gutting whole agencies and departments that are necessary for a nation to be a nation. If we try taking a full accounting of what Trump has done – from federal funding freezes to canceling contracts to firing hundreds of thousands of public servants – it has the feel of something you’d expect to happen after a nation has been beaten, colonized, carved up and sold to the highest bidder.

There may be stronger evidence suggesting that we are a conquered country, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than last week’s meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. Instead of acting like the president of the United States, Trump acted like a puppet ruler assigned by the Kremlin to force Ukraine’s president into accepting peace terms favorable only to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

How could we be conquered without firing a shot? 

The short answer is “real Americans” wanted it that way.

To explain, I’m going to dig into the archives of the Editorial Board for a long excerpt of a piece that I wrote more than a year ago when the Republicans, who controlled only the House at the time, were making the argument that Ukraine did not deserve continued American support in its fight against the invaders. They based that argument almost entirely on a decade’s worth of Russian disinformation that had by then combined seamlessly with the rightwing media apparatus. 

In that piece, I try to explain that inside the real country that is called America there is an imaginary country, a confederacy of the mind and spirit – a subnation, if you will – that is always in a state of war with America. I call this subnation “Realamerica,” because it is inhabited by “real Americans” whose goal in history has always been dominance and control of the United States. They want this so much that they are willing to forge alliances with foreign enemies of the United States. 

That alliance began over 10 years ago when Donald Trump first rode his golden escalator, but it finally paid off in 2024. Russian disinformation helped him and the confederates win the presidential election, and now he and the confederates are paying Putin back by not only trying to bring Ukraine to heel, but also by reversing decades of US foreign policy and dismantling the US government from the inside out.  

If it feels like “the US was defeated in war and is being occupied by a hostile enemy,” as Josh Busby said, that’s because, in a sense, it was.

Here’s a long excerpt of that piece:

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America, the real country, needs no explanation. Realamerica does. It is an imaginary “nation” inside a real nation, a confederacy of the mind and spirit, a place of ignorance and superstition, in which “real Americans” live according to “the laws of God,” not the laws of men, and they share the goal of ruling the real America in God’s name. If it cannot dominate through democratic and constitutional means, it reserves the right to abandon democracy and resort to violence. In the real America, treason is unthinkable. In Realamerica, however, it’s patriotic.

For a long time, Realamericans did rule in the name of God. From the founding until the late 20th century, political leaders “flattered and favored the rural majorities” to win their support, wrote historian Jason Opal. “American culture identified farm folk and small towns as the most authentic and virtuous parts of the nation — or, as President Andrew Jackson put it in 1837, ‘the bone and sinew of the country.’” 

Whatever Realamericans wanted, they generally got – until the social and political revolutions of the 1960s, by which time the United States has grown more urban, more educated and more diverse. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, the federal government stopped balancing the country on the backs of Black people, preventing Realamericans from dominating and controlling the real America by legal means. They have been angry about that since.

Opal said: “The heirs of Jefferson’s ‘chosen people’ lost their status as the most American of Americans. The new, diverse America enrages tens of millions of people who predominantly live in small towns and in the South and mostly identify as white, straight and Christian.”

Donald Trump is the president of “the chosen people” who live in this confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fake “nation” inside a real nation, where democratic politics and liberal values such as universal liberty are now seen less as ideals than as perversions of God’s will. And these chosen people believe that Donald Trump will return to the White House to rule the real America with as much fervor as they believe that Christ will return from heaven to rule the earth for a thousand years. 

It’s due to their faith in “God’s plan” for this confederacy of the mind and spirit that “the chosen” see nothing wrong with the leader of their “country” forging ties with foreign powers that are hostile to the real America. After all, they are a numerical minority these days. They need all the help they can get. The enemy of their enemy is their friend. 

The result is an alliance that has no name, but should. So let’s call it the Russo-Realamerican alliance. It’s a mutually beneficial alignment between the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the president of Realamerica, Donald Trump, against the real America and Joe Biden, as well as against democracy and the ruled-based international order.

In exchange for Putin’s help in getting elected again, by polluting the public square (misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, for instance) and by working closely with his chief propagandists (Tucker Carlson visited the Kremlin, for instance), Trump promises to hand over Ukraine when he becomes president, or to look the other way while Russian tanks roll over it and perhaps the rest of the NATO alliance.

The Russo-Realamerica alliance has been in existence since at least 2016, when the Trump campaign removed from the GOP’s policy plank a commitment to protecting Ukraine’s then-fledgling democracy. The alliance was also evident in Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine’s president in 2019. He wanted Volodymyr Zelensky’s help in smearing Biden before the 2020 election in exchange for the release of military aid. Zelensky refused and Trump was later impeached. (The Kremlin’s sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is obviously further evidence.)

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The confederacy of the mind and spirit – what some political scientists might call a “subnation” – has more in common politically and culturally with Russia than it does with the real nation in which it resides. Its inhabitants believe they are sovereign in all but name. They believe Trump is their legitimate president. That Trump has forged ties with Putin against the real America — that he and some other Republicans might even be in Russian pay — isn’t treasonous. It’s patriotic.