Gut check

The other side has the cowards. That’s not the side to bet.

The Hegseth group chat fuckup is hilarious in many ways — JD Vance’s prayers-up for murdering civilians is among my favorites. But one thing I find especially interesting is how some Democrats I hadn’t been paying attention to, and even had assumed to be finks, have stepped up and shown some moxie.

Senator Jon Ossoff, for instance. Mainly what I’d known before this week about his record in the Tubby II era was that he’d approved four Trump cabinet nominees and did not vote on four — not Fetterman levels of cooption, but not great either. Also I remembered his spectacular rise in 2017, in which he forced a runoff in a House district that hadn’t gone Democrat in 38 years before losing that race but roaring back to win a Senate seat in 2020. That was nice, but I supposed his low profile in the cabinet votes meant that he was trying not to get ahead of his constituency (cue Theme from Deliverance).

How wrong I was. Of late Ossoff has been a firecracker, pushing hard against the DOGE sabotage to Medicaid and the VA, and even getting out ahead of a lot of people on Tubby’s outrageous detention of immigrants. The other day, at a rally for his 2026 reelection campaign, Ossoff said “Georgia will bow to no king” — the sort of talk I expect from blue-state Democrats who are like +20 (and instead get Chuck Fucking Schumer).

Also, the New York Times (har de har har) ran a “Georgia’s First Jewish Senator Is Losing Jewish Support” story in February because Ossoff had the nerve to question Israel’s Gaza genocide. And he’s been right up in the grills of the NatSec doofuses, demanding Hegseth’s resignation.

This guy has guts. And like Gunny Hartman said, guts is enough.

(Well, maybe it’s not enough — Hartman got shot, after all. But it’s a start.)

It also makes a nice contrast with the officials Ossoff was yelling at. Whether they were putting on their best (not to say good) poker faces as they lied to Congress, or braying like Hegseth in his boozed-up press avails, they were quite clearly scared —not so much of their opponents, but mostly of their boss: that he’d have a mood swing and drop-kick them out of the last respectable job any of them will ever have.

There’s enough cowardice to go around. It can be dispiriting to see all the – well, let us call them “liberal-identified” institutions like colleges, public broadcasters, and public interest law firms that have so spectacularly displayed a lack of guts under Trump’s assault.

But you have to think about why, in these early shock-and-awe early days of the putsch, Tubby chose them to attack. You may think it’s because they’re putatively liberal and MAGA rubes love to see them suffer. But their other common denominator — the one that, in America, will always be the primary reason for anything — is big money.

They are vulnerable because they’re rich. I should qualify that: They’re rich but they don’t have fuck-you money, because a lot of their money is contingent on the good graces on the state — either, as in the case of non-profits, because they rely on government grants, or because, as in the case of the law firms, they can’t do business if the executive bars them from federal cases.

Or if the executive even threatens to! We’re still not sure Trump can even do most of this shit. But for these targets the threat is enough. That’s because we live in the Age of Shareholder Interest — the ethos of which is that endless financial growth is what’s important, not whatever corporate, academic, or any other mission may have been primary in the Before Times.

And, because all the people who run any kind of big institutions swim in that same water, the idea of shareholder interest will apply even when there are no shareholders, strictly speaking. NPR doesn’t have shareholders, but it has sponsors; Columbia doesn’t have shareholders, but it has donors. Plus they’re on the government take. And these funding sources loom larger in the administrators’ minds that the people who walk their halls or patronize their products. Thus, the chance of these targets finding their balls and pushing back was always going to be slim.

But some institutions — and, more likely, individuals — are not cowardly, or are not at this moment playing the coward: Some heads of smaller schools, like the president of Wesleyan. Some unions and consortiums representing groups victimized by the administration. Many legal entities devoted to the civil rights like the ACLU and Marc Elias. 23 State Attorneys General. JB Pritzker. Jasmine Crockett. AOC.

Mariann Budde got in there early, daring to preach Christianity to Tubby. That was guts. (People gave Elie Wiesel credit for telling Reagan not to go to Bitburg, but Reagan was much less likely than Trump to have him murdered for it.)

And how about this: Maine Governor Janet Mills not only refused to be intimidated by Trump when he threatened her if she didn’t abandon trans people, she still hasn’t backed down:

In his Truth Social post Saturday, President Trump demanded “full-throated apology” from Governor Mills over what Trump claims was a “totally incorrect” statement from the governor about “men playing in women’s sports”…

On Monday, Governor Mills responded to the president’s demand:

“I read the Constitution. The Constitution says that the president, the chief executive, shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. It doesn't allow him to make laws out of whole cloth by tweet or Instagram post by press release or executive order. That's just fundamental law, and I stand by the rule of law and separation of powers.”

Let Columbia snivel. Let Hegseth and Gabbard and the rest of the MAGA creeps huddle behind lies they pray will conceal their cowardice. Hell, let Tubby keep shooting off his big guns, hoping this shock-and-awe opening display will scare everyone into compliance quickly because he knows that once he’s run through all the soft targets, he’ll have an actual fight on his tiny hands. We are seeing an outbreak of courage here, and I’m told it’s contagious.