Print the propaganda: Trump’s new Red Scare

In the Trumpian narrative, the world exists in an endless, ahistorical present where the script is written during late-night barrages of social media posts, and over which the president asserts Orwellian control.

At midnight on Friday, July 10, the Road to Housing Act officially went into effect in the United States. This legislative package – which includes incentives for new housing construction, limits on real estate and financial speculation and rental subsidies – passed with massive majorities: 85 to 4 in the Senate and 358 to 32 in the House. In short, it was a minor bipartisan miracle for a genuinely useful law, delivered by a Congress that has been paralyzed by gridlock for a year and has passed only about 20 bills.

This law, however, had the unique distinction of taking effect without the president's signature. In retaliation against Congress for failing to pass the electoral reform he demanded ahead of the midterms, Donald Trump flatly refused to do the official signing.

The bill ended up coming into effect automatically (after ten days, according to the rules, barring an explicit executive branch veto), but the obstructionist president’s political theater once again projected the paradoxical image of a nation – and his own party – held hostage by presidential whims.

The capriciousness of the “sovereign president” is universally known by now, thoroughly understood by political allies and adversaries, Iranian negotiators and heads of state alike. In Regime Change, the latest book by The New York Times reporters Maggie........

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