In his essay, “A bad parade is a good sign” at The.Ink, Anand Giridharadas shares a hopeful idea: “The country that invented jazz was never going to be good at putting on a military parade. It was never going to be us…In the wake of Donald Trump’s flaccid, chaotic, lightly attended, and generally awkward military parade, a meme began doing the rounds. Its basic format was the juxtaposition of images of the kinds of parades Trump presumably wanted with the parade he actually got…Trump’s biggest mistake was wanting a military parade in the first place. The United States military is not a birthday party rental company. Any therapist will tell you that no number of green tanks on the street is enough to heal the deep void left by a father’s withheld love…But, setting aside the wisdom of wanting a military parade, there is the issue of execution. Even if you’re going to do the wrong thing, do it well. Do it with flair. With the most powerful military in history at his disposal, Trump couldn’t even pull off a decent parade…it’s not his fault alone. It’s hard to wring a military parade of the kind he dreamed of from a people free in their bones…No matter how much money and effort you throw at the parade, you cannot escape the fact that America is not the country of North Korean unity. We’re the country of Korean tacos…America is not the country of perfectly synced swinging arms. It’s the country of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” That song, by the legendary Duke Ellington, belongs to a genre of music that could only have been invented in America — jazz…it seems to me societies that have the thing Trump wanted in his parade don’t got that swing, and societies that got that swing don’t have the thing he craved…Trump, in one regard, at least, faces steep odds. His project depends on turning Americans into something we are deeply not: uniform, cohesive, disciplined, in lockstep…But we are more hotsteppers than locksteppers. We are more improvised solo than phalanx. We are more unruly than rule-following…We don’t march shoulder to shoulder. We shimmy.”

Americans in general and the political commentariat in particular don’t pay enough attention to what is going on in the state legislatures, including the heroic contributions of the most productive members of those policy-making bodies. But there are exceptions, and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. once again leads the way with his column, “Melissa Hortman’s legacy is a ‘Minnesota Miracle’: Slain former state House speaker delivered big policy victories for Democrats,” in which he writes: “Hortman lived her highly constructive life in politics in the knowledge that achieving change democratically requires painstaking work: planning, coalition-building, persuasion, conciliation, vote-counting. She achieved far more using these humble, but ultimately exhilarating, tools of self-government than any violent fanatic ever will…I can’t do full justice here to all that Hortman and her colleagues achieved, but a lengthy partial list can give you a sense of just how much they got done. The miracle included legislation for paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, abortion rights and voting rights…Also on the list were background checks for private gun transfers, red flag laws, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, investment in affordable housing, big steps toward a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, new reading curriculums based on phonics, a $2.58 billion capital construction package, laws strengthening workers’ rights, unemployment insurance for hourly workers, a refundable child credit for lower-income Minnesotans; and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota K-12 students…She thus worked to bring together Democratic legislators from the metro Twin Cities, many on the left, and those closer to the center from rural and small-town areas. Preparing for efforts to enact progressive tax reform, Hortman told me, she appointed a staunch progressive from Minneapolis to chair one of the House’s tax committees and a moderate from the increasingly conservative Iron Range to chair the other. “If we couldn’t get both of them on board, then it wouldn’t be something our caucus could do.” That’s a practical politician speaking.”

“In the five months Trump has held office in his second term,” Thomas B. Edsall writes in “Trump Is Daring Us to Impeach Him Again” at the NYT, “the number of impeachable offenses legal scholars estimate that he has already committed range from three to eight or more…This is not to say Trump will be impeached. The current Republican-controlled House is far too subservient to even consider it…In pursuit of his agenda, Trump has sacrificed due process, gutted congressional authority, politicized the administration of justiceand run roughshod over the First Amendment.” Edsall quotes several legal experts who provide a long list of impeachable offenses and adds, “Winning a Senate conviction of Trump on House-approved impeachment charges, which requires 67 senators, would be a much tougher hill to climb, possible only if Trump suffers debilitating political setbacks over the next three years…A failure to achieve a Senate conviction does not, however, guarantee that Trump gets off the hook. A number of the impeachable offenses cited above would justify criminal inquiries, especially Trump’s cryptocurrency profiteering. The president’s ventures into digital currency clearly fall outside the standard of “official acts” that the Supreme Court exempted from criminal prosecution in its 2024 decision, Trump v. United States…So the man who once boasted “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” may one day get his comeuppance. There is no guarantee that will happen, of course, but it may turn out that some sense of justice has survived Trumps multipronged assault on our legal system…If Trump does go scot free, untouched by either a third impeachment or criminal prosecution, it will be an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Even so, if he is allowed to retire peacefully to enjoy his cryptocurrency wealth, his presidency will still go down in history as the embodiment of injustice, malfeasance, cruelty and transgression.”

Some observations from “Donald Trump’s Dirty Self-Dealing: The Audacity of His Rapacity: The first term was historically corrupt. But this time Trump has grabbed billions already—and by the time he’s done, he may make off with tens of billions” by Joe Conason at The New Republic: “The Trump family’s return to power turbocharged their drive for profit with the immense influence wielded by the president, who stood to benefit directly despite the nominal control of the Trump Organization and related entities by Eric and Don Jr. To describe their flurry of real estate deals, corporate startups, cryptocurrency ventures, and media shakedowns as “frantic” would grossly understate the pace and scale of Trump family dealmaking in the initial months of his second term. It’s hard to think of anything even remotely resembling their grab for cash in the history of U.S. government, not even when they first came to power…Tracking the conflicts of interest and coercive profiteering that have erupted in Trump’s orbit over the past several months is a massive challenge for media organizations and public interest groups. Nearly every day, a new and preposterous grift seems to materialize, especially since he and his family have inserted themselves so forcefully into the crypto industry. Many of these schemes emit a strong stench of bribery, extortion, or blatantly violate the emoluments clause, or both…In addition to Musk, whose hundreds of millions in campaign donations were rewarded with unprecedented authority to reshape government agencies that regulate his businesses (and that might award contracts to them), several of the world’s biggest corporate entities have delivered payoffs to Trump and his family since last November.”