The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.

A lot of smart people have been in denial about AI for understandable reasons: – the people pitching it can be distasteful – there’s been a ton of snake-oil hype – it’s easier not to reckon with a major disruption

A defining feature of Trump II has been its war on environmental policy: -gutting the EPA -attacking climate research and cutting its funding -blocking renewables -and opening public lands to drilling.

Lol

Really excellent point. A lot of political/influencer grift stems from blocked ambition. They couldn’t make it via the normie route, but feel they deserve more. So they grift.

*No Option But Sabotage* is out in 10 days. Pre-order links are pinned—thank you for all the support!

Did NAFTA unintentionally reshape Mexico’s drug violence? A new JDE paper (Hidalgo, Hornung & Selaya) shows NAFTA may have raised the value of trafficking corridors, reorganizing where drug-related violence occurred. open.substack.com/pub/garciapo...

This is a great point. Trump is a charismatic leader. And one of the major risks of charismatic leadership is that it’s very difficult to replace. The next R leader will likely have a hard time replicating his support and winning coalition.

The worst form of journalism today is stating a fact about something outlandish or dangerous that Trump said or did in the lede without context /implications to the health of our democracy.

Really enjoyed the conversation last Friday at Politics and Prose with @jjgreenjr.bsky.social —talking repression, protest tactics, and climate activism. We discussed my new book, No Option But Sabotage, that comes out Feb 16 with @academic.oup.com ⬇️

Quick thought on the John Murdoch-Burns piece in FT: it's an interesting exercise with some strong insights, but the headline result most are pointing to (US Backsliding faster than Hungary/Venezuela/Russia!) is kind of misleading. www.ft.com/content/b474...

"Both elected branches seem to have grown uninterested in making political...arguments to the American people, & rely on both active-duty & retired officers to do it for them. Ms. Schake rightly warns that this practice undermines their long-term interest in political supremacy over the military."

🚨Job alert 🚨 I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026. If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026. 📤 Please share widely! www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

This is a really important and novel insight about where we are 👇👇👇

Without knowing the details of how this backsliding index is constructed, I worry it may not be capturing durable authoritarian consolidation. Despite all the chaos, the U.S. has not (yet) experienced media capture or electoral manipulation. At least not on the scale seen in the other cases…

Great post and thread by @donmoyn.bsky.social, but I disagree with the core interpretation. Trump looks less like someone carefully consolidating authoritarian rule, and more like someone gambling for resurrection.

now in print in the new issue of APSR: Campos and Federico (2026), "A New Measure of Affective Polarization" -->

Vladimir Putin arrests journalists for spreading “fake news” and “insulting the armed forces.” But Russia doesn’t have a 1st amendment and vociferous defenders of free speech.

Be Sure to join us tonight! EXcited to moderate the discussion with Thomas. This is a VERY well done book and has some good insights into what the future holds for this movement.

1/ NEW: @propublica.org has obtained a search warrant that the FBI is executing for records related to the contested 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., which has not yet been widely shared. It’s an extraordinary document. Link: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

There are two ways to frame what happened in Fulton County today. A) FBI and others indulging Trump in his weird 2020 obsession B) A threat to future election integrity and democracy itself. Media coverage has been A. But scholars & practitioners who study democratic backsliding see B.

Looking forward to this book talk on Friday —really important work by @zeitzoff.bsky.social on the growing threat of climate change and the ways activists are responding to it.

I’ll be doing a book talk with @jjgreenjr.bsky.social for my new book: *No Option But Sabotage* at Politics and Prose (The Wharf) this Friday, 1/30. We'll be discussing: -the climate crisis -social movement -protest tactics -and responses to repression politics-prose.com/thomas-zeitz...

“What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy.” Gift link

What motivates people to engage in climate advocacy? In a new PNAS Nexus megastudy [https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf400] led by @dgoldwert.bsky.social we tested 17 theoretical interventions on a large US sample (N=31,324) to increase public, political, and financial climate advocacy. 1/5

On Saturday, 1/24, mere hours after Alex Pretti was murdered by federal agents, the White House screened the “Melania” documentary for tech billionaires & CEOs. It was absurd. But also revealing. The authoritarian threat in the U.S. is deeply intertwined with the power of tech billionaires. -🧵-

Even fewer people believe administration lies the second time

Germany's paper of record (not exactly a paragon of progressiveness) comes out in favor of boycotting the World Cup.

When you explain it plainly, it’s hard not to see where we are as a country.

This is a key point and problem for the opposition. Elites, even those directly harmed, haven’t pushed back enough against Trump and his policies.

That's right! It's my pleasure to join Thomas for a robust discussion of his great, new book! Joins us there!

I’m excited to share that I’ll be doing a book talk and launch with @jjgreenjr.bsky.social for my new book: *No Option But Sabotage* at Politics and Prose (The Wharf) next Friday, 1/30. politics-prose.com/thomas-zeitz...

Claude Code is an amazing tool for social science researchers. It does not think and it does not interpret properly, but it generates and executes code with a speed and accuracy that I could never have anticipated.

Lots of talk recently about Trump, the Transatlantic alliance, and whether a U.S.–EU/NATO rift was “inevitable" (structural). My take: politics is choices under constraints. And in Trump’s II, we’re watching Trump and his people make *a lot of choices.*

I wrote this piece with @jkertzer.bsky.social nearly nine years ago on what to expect from Trump's foreign policy. It still holds up. If anything, the underlying pathologies have intensified, and the guardrails are gone. politicalviolenceataglance.org/2017/02/13/b...

It is even worse than it looks

This is what clown time in Washington has produced. I agree with this read. Americans need to get ready for a world in which we are poorer, more isolated, and weaker than in any of our lives. And we need to think seriously about how to repair relations with our closest allies. The need is urgent.

This 2021 piece by Rumer and @andrewsweiss.bsky.social on "Ukraine: Putin’s Unfinished Business" is so eerily prescient. You can literally substitute Trump for Putin and Greenland for Ukraine and the logic is largely the same. carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

"It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home."

The dynamic I'd guess we're likely to see going forward: Trump gets less popular → stops trying to persuade More heavy-handed repression at home + strikes abroad More protests → more crackdowns → even less popularity Key is elite defection: can opposition peel off business and other elites?

What is happening in America right now. The arbitrary power of a tyrant deployed against his political enemies.

I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

We need less research framing the problem facing our country as "polarization" and more research framing the problem as "anti-democratic radicalization".

This beautifully written piece by my pal @adambonica.bsky.social is worth your time today. A bit of light amid the darkness. open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

An intervention found that blocking internet access on smartphones for 2 weeks improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

There’s a lot of talk today about violent rhetoric—who’s responsible, and what leads to political violence. As someone who wrote a book on violent rhetoric, here’s what we actually know:

Many are arguing that they wouldn't be acting this way if they thought they were subject to free & fair elections. Plausible. But another explanation is that they see the writing on the wall--generational backlash--and they're attempting increasingly desparate hail marys

Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

This is crazy. Will be hard to rejoin given the Senate.