Category: Politics

Watching the space between two nations shrink became a regular pastime for Detroiters over the past decade as the segments of the Gordie Howe International Bridge gradually grew, extending meter by meter from Ontario on one side and Michigan on the other.

The gap finally closed in July 2024 with the two halves coming together in a long-awaited kiss.

The official grand opening of the bridge was originally scheduled for fall of 2025, but it seems now likely to be delayed into 2026.

I’m a sociologist who has worked alongside neighborhood revitalization projects in Detroit for the past 15 years. I’ve observed the bridge project – and the many tensions around it – from the perspective of adjacent communities of Delray and Mexicantown, communities that are largely home to low-income Latino, Black and white residents.

The costs and benefits of this binational behemoth are complex and intertwined.

Clearing a chokehold

Boosters on both sides of the border have spoken frequently of the bridge’s expected benefits.

Detroit and Windsor would finally be free of the perpetual chokehold produced by the privately owned Ambassador Bridge.

Auto parts will flow more freely over the border, according to the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor. And the Detroit Greenways Coalition is celebrating that its advocacy led to the inclusion of free pedestrian and bike lanes.

People living close to the existing bridge will gain some relief from truck traffic and pollution. But this burden won’t simply disappear – it will be shifted nearby, where others will have to cope with increased traffic flowing over six lanes 24 hours a day.

A political football

The costs and benefits of the bridge were contested from the beginning.

In the early days, the debate concentrated on who would own the bridge and who would pay for it.

Once just a concept known by the acronym DRIC, or Detroit River International Crossing, the project became real under former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. In July 2018, representatives from both Ottawa and Washington broke ground on the bridge situated in an area of Detroit empty enough to contain its significant footprint and bear its weight without fear of sinkholes from underground salt mines.

“Every Michigander should thank every Canadian,” said Snyder at the time, alluding to the agreement that Canadian taxpayers alone would pay for the bridge’s construction in exchange for collecting all the tolls.

The bridge’s designers attempted to honor the cultural and natural history of the region. It was named after the legendary Canadian hockey player who was also a longtime stalwart for the Detroit Red Wings. The bridge’s towers are adorned with murals by First Nations artists.

But serious questions remain.

Today the debates center on whether the Trump administration’s increased tariffs and trade conflicts with Canada could negatively affect the value of the bridge – and if it will ever pay for itself. Even before President Donald Trump took office for the second time, truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge was down, falling 8% from 2014 to 2024.

One bridge was always a bad idea, (nearly) everyone agreed

Residents and politicians have long agreed that having a single, privately owned bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor was a bad idea. This felt especially apparent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks laid bare the possibility of suddenly losing critical infrastructure.

For many years, travelers’ only other connection between Canada and Detroit has been a tunnel that runs underneath the Detroit River. However, the tunnel doesn’t offer direct access to interstate highways, making it less suitable for commercial trucks.

Adding another bridge makes it harder to disrupt trade and transport.

But the project has had one stalwart critic. Matty Moroun, the trucking billionaire who purchased the Ambassador Bridge in 1979, ferociously protected his asset against potential competition. He actively sought to thwart the construction, launching numerous lawsuits against the state of Michigan and the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the entity managing construction of the new bridge.

Those lawsuits continued even after Moroun’s death in 2020, as his heirs asserted significant damages to the value of their property.

Was enough done for nearby homeowners?

Others have criticized the attempts to compensate the residents of Delray, a once-vibrant neighborhood that has been impacted by industrialization since the 1960s.

Benefits negotiated for residents and homeowners affected by the construction have not increased as the project’s costs ballooned and the timeline to complete it stretched out.

The cost of the Gordie Howe bridge is now estimated at around $6.4 billion Canadian – or about $US4.7 billion. That is $700 million more than the original projected cost. The project is at least 10 months behind schedule.

Simone Sagovac, director of the SW Detroit Community Benefit Coalition, said they did not anticipate the immense scale of the development and its continued effects on the community.

“That scale affected health and quality of life significantly every day, with years of continuous industrial dust causing sinus problems, headaches, and increasing asthma, and then there will be thousands of daily truck impacts to come,” Sagovac wrote to me in an email.

A baseline health impact assessment, issued in 2019 by University of Michigan researchers working closely with the coalition, expressed concern about the heightened airborne pollution that would likely activate asthma, especially in children. Matching the findings of so many other epidemiological studies, the assessment found that residents living within 500 feet (152 meters) of a truck route reported a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing asthma or allergies affecting their breathing.

Sagovac wrote that the project took 250 homes, 43 businesses and five churches by eminent domain, and “saw the closing of more after.” One hundred families left the neighborhood via a home swap program funded as a result of the benefits agreement administered by a local nonprofit. Two hundred and seventy families remain, but most businesses have left the area over decades of decline.

The families that remain are often long-term residents wanting or needing a cheap place to live and willing to put up with dust, noise and smells from nearby factories and a sewage treatment plant.

“They constantly face illegal dumping and other unanswered crimes, and will face the worst diesel emissions exposure and other trucking and industry impacts,” Sagovac wrote.

Heather Grondin, chief relations officer of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, wrote in an emailed statement
that they have taken steps to minimize impacts from construction and that they regularly meet with the community to hear concerns.

“Construction traffic is using designated haul routes to minimize community impacts, traffic congestion and wear and tear on existing infrastructure while maximizing public and construction safety,” Grondin wrote.

According to Grondin, cars will be forced to follow a “no idling” rule on the American side to minimize pollution. Other aspects of the Community Benefits Plan included $20,000 in free repairs for 100 homes, planting hundreds of trees and investing in programs addressing food insecurity and the needs of young people and seniors, Grondin wrote.

An updated Health Impacted Assessment is expected to be released later in 2025.

History lost

Lloyd Baldwin, a historian for the Michigan Department of Transportation, was tasked with evaluating whether local landmarks like the legendary Kovacs Bar needed to be preserved.

“Kovacs Bar was one among many working-class bars in the Delray neighborhood but stands out for its roughly eight-decade association as a gathering place for the neighborhood and downriver Hungarian-American community,” Baldwin wrote in one such report.

The bar was nonetheless demolished in November 2017.

This was not MDOT’s only loss. While the agency made some sincere efforts to leverage other benefits for residents who remained, dynamic factors at many levels were out of the agency’s control.

For one thing, the numerous lawsuits filed by the bridge company over parcels of contested land limited MDOT’s ability to talk openly to the public about the land acquisition process.

In the period of legal limbo, Baldwin said, “the neighborhood imploded.”

Baldwin gave the example of the Berwalt Manor Apartments, built in the 1920s and located on Campbell Street near the bridge entrance. MDOT committed to preserve the historic building and proposed to mitigate the environmental impacts on mostly low-income residents by paying for new windows and HVAC units once the bridge was built.

But the speed of development outstripped the pace of community compensation. The building passed through probate court in 2018 and has since changed hands multiple times, so it is now unclear whether there are any low-income residents left to benefit from upgrades.

Benefits yet to be measured

On the brighter side, environmentalists have pointed to the expansion and connection of bicycle trails and bird migration corridors as long-term benefits of the Gordie Howe bridge.

On the Canadian side, the bridge construction falls largely outside of Windsor’s residential neighborhoods, so it caused less disruption. As part of the project,bike lanes, enhanced landscaping, and gathering spaces were added to an approach road called Sandwich Street.

Cross-border tourism spurred on by a proposed system of greenways called the “Great Lakes Way” may provide new opportunities for people and money to flow across the Detroit River, improving the quality of life for communities that remain.

But if the trade war between the Trump administration and Canada continues, observers may question whether the bridge is a graceful gift of infrastructure to two nations or one of the world’s longest and skinniest white elephants.

Paul Draus is affiliated with the Downriver Delta CDC and Friends of the Rouge. The Fort Street Bridge Park, a project that Draus is affiliated with, received a donation for a public sculpture from the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority in 2020.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Imagine a protest outside the funeral of a popular political leader, with some of the protesters celebrating the death and holding signs that say things like “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed” and “Don’t Pray for the USA.”

No matter the political leanings of that leader, most Americans would probably abhor such a protest and those signs.

What would tolerate such activities, no matter how distasteful? The First Amendment.

The situation described above is taken from an actual protest, though it did not involve the funeral of a political figure. Instead, members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested outside the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a U.S. service member killed in Iraq.

Through demonstrations like this, members of this group were conveying their belief that the U.S. is overly tolerant of those they perceive as sinners, especially people from the LGBTQ community, and that the death of U.S. soldiers should be recognized as divine retribution for such sinfulness.

Snyder’s family sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. A jury issued a US$5 million jury award in favor of the family of the deceased service member. But in a nearly unanimous decision issued in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment insulated the protesters from such a judgment.

This holding is particularly instructive today.

The Trump administration has vowed to crack down on what it calls hate speech. It has labeled antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group, a terrorist organization. And it has sought to punish figures such as TV host Jimmy Kimmel for statements perceived critical of conservative activists.

What the First Amendment makes clear is that it does not just protect the rights of speakers who say things with which Americans agree. Or, as the Supreme Court said in a separate decision it issued one year after the case involving the funeral protesters: “The Nation well knows that one of the costs of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech we detest as well as the speech we embrace.”

But free speech is not absolute. As a legal scholar who has studied political movements, free speech and privacy, I realize the government can regulate speech through what are known as “reasonable time, place, and manner” restrictions. These limits cannot depend upon the content of the speech or expressive conduct in which a speaker is engaged, however.

For example, the government can ban campfires in an area prone to wildfires. But if it banned the burning of the U.S. flag only as a form of political protest, that would be an unconstitutional restriction on speech.

Protected and unprotected speech

There are certain categories of speech that are not entitled to First Amendment protection. They include incitement to violence, obscenity, defamation and what are considered “true threats.”

When, for example, someone posts threats on social media with reckless disregard for whether they will instill legitimate fear in their target, such posts are not a protected form of speech. Similarly, burning a cross on someone’s property as a means of striking terror in them such that they fear bodily harm also represents this kind of true threat.

There are also violations of the law that are sometimes prosecuted as “hate crimes,” criminal acts driven by some discriminatory motive. In these cases, it’s generally not the perpetrator’s beliefs that are punished but the fact that they act on them and engage in some other form of criminal conduct, as when someone physically assaults their victim based on that victim’s race or religion. Such motives can increase the punishment people receive for the underlying criminal conduct.

Speech that enjoys the strongest free-speech protections is that which is critical of government policies and leaders. As the Supreme Court said in 1966, “There is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of (the First) Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia would explain in 2003, “The right to criticize the government” is at “the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect.”

Restrictions on government action

The First Amendment prevents the government from taking direct action to curtail speech by, for example, trying to prevent the publication of material critical of it. Americans witnessed this in the Pentagon Papers case, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent newspapers from publishing a leaked – and politically damaging – study on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But it also applies when the government acts in indirect ways, such as threatening to investigate a media company or cutting funding for a university based on politically disfavored action or inaction.

In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state of New York’s efforts to punish companies that did business with the National Rifle Association because of the organization’s political positions violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

Similarly, in recent months, courts have ruled on First Amendment grounds against Trump administration efforts to punish law firms or to withhold funds from Harvard University.

And just last week, a federal court in Florida threw out a lawsuit filed by President Trump against The New York Times seeking $15 billion for alleged harm to the president’s investments and reputation.

Nevertheless, some people fear government retribution for criticizing the administration. And some, like the TV network ABC, have engaged in speech-restricting action on their own, such as taking Kimmel temporarily off the air for his comments critical of conservative activists in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Before Kimmel’s suspension, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr described his negotiations with ABC’s parent company, Disney, to take action against him. “We could do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. And Trump said that some media companies might “lose their license” for criticizing the president. It is encouraging that, in the face of these threats, ABC has reversed course and agreed to put Kimmel back on the air.

The First Amendment protects speech across the political spectrum, even speech Americans do not like. Both liberal comedian Jon Stewart and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson have recently agreed on this. As Carlson said recently, “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”

Just last year in the NRA case referenced above, the Supreme Court clearly stated that even indirect government efforts to curtail protected speech are indeed unconstitutional. In light of that ruling, efforts to limit criticism of the administration, any administration, should give all Americans, regardless of their political views, great pause.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised retribution against his perceived enemies. As president, he is doing that.

At the Department of Justice, a “Weaponization Working Group” has a long list of Trump’s perceived enemies to investigate. At the FBI, director Kash Patel has conducted a political purge, firing the highest officials at the bureau and thousands of FBI agents who investigated alleged crimes by Trump as well as investigated participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots.

It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has targeted massive numbers of people perceived to be political enemies.

Trump’s recent fury showed how much he expects top officials in federal law enforcement to carry out his retribution.

He was enraged when Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, decided there was insufficient evidence to charge two people Trump regards as enemies: former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“I want him out,” Trump angrily told reporters on Sept. 19, 2025. Siebert resigned, although Trump claimed he had fired him.

Trump’s most recent demands for retribution came soon after top adviser Stephen Miller’s vow to prosecute leftists in the “vast domestic terror movement” – that the administration blames, without evidence, for Charlie Kirk’s assassination – using “every resource we have.”

As the director of the FBI, Patel will likely be in charge of the investigations of perceived enemies generated by the Department of Justice and the White House. He already has sacrificed the bureau’s independence, making it essentially an arm of the White House.

This isn’t the first time an FBI director has been driven by a desire to suppress the rights of people perceived to be political enemies. Hoover, director until his death in 1972, operated a secret FBI within the FBI that he used to destroy people and organizations whose political opinions he opposed.

A burglary’s revelations

Hoover’s secret FBI was revealed, beginning in 1971, when a group of people called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office and removed files.

This group suspected Hoover’s FBI was illegally suppressing dissent. Given Hoover’s enormous power, they thought it was unlikely any government agency would investigate the FBI. They decided documentary evidence was needed to convince the public that suppression of dissent – what they considered a crime against democracy – was taking place.

In my book “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI,” I describe how these eight people decided to risk imprisonment and break into the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania.

The files they stole and made public confirmed the FBI was suppressing dissent. But they revealed much more: Hoover’s secret FBI and the startling crimes he had committed. These secret operations had become so extensive that they eventually diminished the bureau’s capacity to carry out its core mission: law enforcement.

Hoover, one of the most admired and powerful officials in the country, had secretly conducted a wide array of operations directed against people whose political opinions he opposed.

The files revealed that agents were instructed to “enhance paranoia” and make activists think there was an FBI agent “behind every mailbox.” Questioning Vietnam war policy could cause anyone, even a U.S. senator, Democrat J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, to be placed under FBI surveillance.

It was the revelation of Hoover’s worst operations, COINTELPRO – what Hoover called The Counter Intelligence Program – that made Americans demand investigation and reform of the FBI. Until the mid-1970s, there had never been oversight of the FBI and little coverage of the FBI by journalists, except for laudatory stories.

‘Almost beyond belief’

The COINTELPRO operations ranged from crude to cruel to murderous.

Antiwar activists were given oranges injected with powerful laxatives. Agents hired prostitutes known to have venereal disease to infect campus antiwar leaders.

Many of the COINTELPRO operations were almost beyond belief:

· The project conducted against the entire University of California system lasted more than 30 years. Hundreds of agents and informants were assigned in 1960 to spy on each of Berkeley’s 5,365 faculty members by reading their mail, observing them and searching for derogatory information – “illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking, other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability.”

· An informant trained to give perjured testimony led to the murder conviction of Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He served 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was exonerated in 1997 when a judge found that the FBI concealed evidence that would have proved Pratt’s innocence.

· The bureau spied for years on Martin Luther King Jr. After it was announced King would receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover approved a particularly sinister plan that was designed to cause King to commit suicide.

· What one historian called Hoover’s “savage hatred” of Black people led to the FBI’s worst operation, a collaboration with the Chicago police that resulted in the killing of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton, shot dead by police as he slept. An FBI informant had been hired to ingratiate himself with Hampton. He came to know Hampton and the apartment very well. He drew a map of the apartment for the police on which he located “Fred’s bed.” After the killing, Hoover thanked the informant for his role in this successful operation. Enclosed in his letter was a cash bonus.

· Actress Jean Seberg was the victim of a 1970 COINTELPRO operation. In a memo, Hoover wrote that she had donated to the Panthers and “should be neutralized.” Seberg was pregnant, and the plot, approved personally by Hoover – as many COINTELPRO plots were – called for the FBI to tell a gossip columnist that a Black Panther was the father. Agents gave the false rumor to a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist. Without using Seberg’s name, the columnist’s story made it unmistakable that she was writing about Seberg. Three days later, Seberg gave birth prematurely to a stillborn white baby girl. Every year on the anniversary of her dead baby’s birth, Seberg attempted suicide. She succeeded in August 1979.

There was wide public interest in these revelations about COINTELPRO, many of which emerged in 1975 during hearings conducted by the Church Committee, the Senate committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat.

At this first-ever congressional investigation of the FBI and other intelligence agencies, former FBI officials testified under oath about bureau policies under Hoover.

One of them, William Sullivan, who had helped carry out the plots against King, was asked whether officials considered the legal and ethical issues involved in their operations. He responded:

“Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the questions: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to that line of questioning because we were just pragmatic. The one thing we were concerned about: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want.”

Ethical? Legal?

The future of the new FBI under Patel and Trump is unclear, especially in light of the president’s known tolerance for lawlessness, even violence. His gifts of clemency and pardons to Jan. 6 rioters are evidence of that.

As for Patel, fired FBI Officials stated in their recent lawsuit over those dismissals that Patel had told one of them it was “likely illegal” to fire agents because of the cases they had worked on, but that he was powerless to resist Trump’s demands.

The recent statements from both Trump and top aide Miller suggest the FBI’s independence, and broader constitutional requirements that the administration remain faithful to the law, are meaningless to them. They suggest that, like Hoover, they would criminalize dissent.

What will happen at the FBI after the internal purge ends? Will retribution fever wane? Will Patel refocus on the bureau’s chief mission, law enforcement? And will the questions asked in Congress in 1975, as the bureau was being forced to reject Hoover’s worst practices, be asked now: Is what we are doing ethical? Is it legal?

Betty Medsger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Congress faces a deadline of Oct. 1 to adopt a spending measure to keep the federal government open. Various reporters will be interviewing serious people saying serious things in the basement corridors of the U.S. Capitol. There will also be political posturing, misrepresentation and either braggadocio or evasion. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed congressional expert Charlie Hunt, a political scientist at Boise State University, about the now-perennial drama over spending in Congress and what’s very different about this year’s conflict.

In the past, how did Congress pass budgets so that government could keep operating?

Typically, you would get an actual passage of a full budget for a year. But in the last 20 or 30 years or so, since we’ve become a more polarized country with a polarized Congress, we have a lot of what are called continuing resolutions, or CRs.They’re stopgap measures – not the full budget – and don’t tend to make a lot of changes on a lot of the spending priorities that Congress has.

Continuing resolutions usually just extend current levels of spending for a short time so that the two parties can continue negotiating. But as negotiations over long-term budgets have tended to fail more and more, these CR’s are becoming more common, and Congress almost never passes a full budget on a yearly basis at this point.

What’s the role of the president here?

The president has the power to veto any piece of legislation, and that includes the federal budget. Essentially, what majorities in Congress need when they are going into a budget fight is either the president’s implicit sign-off on whatever they pass, or they need enough votes to override the president’s veto.

Congress and the presidency right now are both held by Republicans, they’re in pretty deep alignment, so that’s not as much of a concern this time. It’s really just what Trump wants that needs to be a part of this legislation, and if there’s something in it that he really doesn’t like, then Congress needs to go back to the drawing board and the Republicans need to find out a way to get that into the bill.

What is driving each party in these negotiations?

Two different things are at work here. One is that Congress, as I mentioned, is really polarized. The two parties are farther apart from each other than they used to be. So the average Democrat and the average Republican aren’t going to agree as much on policy priorities and funding priorities than they did, say, in the 1980s or 1970s or before that.

The other thing is that Congress in recent decades has been more closely divided than they have been in the recent past, say, the last century. In both chambers, House and Senate, it’s very rare for one party or the other to have some massive majority. You need a majority of 60 in the Senate to have a chance at passing most legislation, for example, and this big a majority hasn’t happened since 2009. That’s something President Obama enjoyed with the Democrats for just a short period of time.

Since then, there have been very closely divided chambers in Congress, and that means that you need, at least in the Senate, some bipartisanship in order to pass that 60-vote threshold to break a filibuster. That’s what’s really gumming up the works right now. Democrats don’t feel like they’re being included in negotiations, and so they’re not likely to agree to a Republican-only budget in the Senate.

What is different about the 2025 budget fight than previous ones?

A lot of the dynamics are still the same. You still have partisan fighting. And you still have some divides within the two parties that I think are worth mentioning. One example: There was a Senate vote just the other day on one of these budget resolutions, and a couple of Republicans voted with the Democrats. So for some of these more deficit-hawk Republicans, that concern is still playing a role.

What’s new this time around is this element of rescissions. This is a tool that’s been available since the 1970s in which presidents ask Congress to rescind spending that they had allocated. This is what happened earlier this year with the rescissions on public broadcasting – NPR and PBS – that got a lot of attention, as well as on USAID. Trump said he wanted to cut funding for public broadcasting – the GOP in the Senate and House voted to let him. They didn’t need 60 votes in the Senate for a rescission, either. Just a majority for this move.

So in this case, Democrats are looking at this and thinking, “Why should we negotiate, if you’re just going to rescind that later on without our consent?” That’s a major element that’s changed. While it’s a power that has been in place for a while, Trump and the Republicans have been really willing to wield that.

Do you see this rescission power being exercised with every budget or continuing resolution that Congress passes?

This is a pretty serious breach of what we call Congress’ “power of the purse.” That spending power is set out in Article 1 of the Constitution. It is a key power, maybe their most important power and point of leverage they have in going back and forth with the president and making sure the executive branch doesn’t accrue too much power.

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Read more:
Congress, not the president, decides on government spending − a constitutional law professor explains how the ‘power of the purse’ works

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But if this rescission authority is going to be used in this way going forward, where basically any spending priority that the president doesn’t want or doesn’t want to fund is going to be subject to rescission, then Congress doesn’t really have the power of the purse, right? They have a president who is going to veto anything that doesn’t live up to their expectations, or they can just sign it and then ask for these rescissions later.

The key thing here is that President Trump currently has in Congress a set of Republicans in both the House and the Senate who are willing to do virtually anything he wants and are subject to a lot of the political pressures in their districts that put him in office in the first place. So if they don’t go along with rescissions, they’re going to face the wrath of their Republican voters in their district.

That’s one thing that’s really changed in the last 30 years that I think gives the president a lot more authority in these matters, and makes rescission such a powerful tool that did not exist before.

Charlie Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In his second term as president, Donald Trump has deployed U.S. military forces in rarely used roles in domestic law enforcement.

Besides sending military troops to Los Angeles to counter protests over immigration raids, Trump sent the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., claiming crime in the city is “out of control.”

As a political scientist who studies civil-military relations, I recognize the fundamental problems of militarizing domestic law enforcement, which the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits.

Militarizing law enforcement risks using excessive force against civilians by troops trained for warfare. And it undermines a constitutional principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that limits the coercive power of the state against its citizens.

A more menacing problem, however, is politicizing the military through association with partisan politics. That erodes public trust in the armed forces.

With continued militarization of law enforcement, the United States is entering largely uncharted waters.

But in other countries, including Chile and Argentina, this is familiar territory. There, established democracies broke down in the 1970s into military dictatorships.

In the years before these breakdowns, the militaries in both countries were broadly opposed to meddling in politics.

However, civilian elites could not resolve their own governance failures. They exacerbated civil unrest and economic instability and successfully encouraged the military to intervene.

Trump administration tactics

Three Trump administration tactics mirror those of officials in Chile and Argentina who politicized their militaries.

The first is priming the public to focus on exaggerated threats to society. Trump administration officials have sought to “liberate” Los Angeles. They have touted arrests of the “… Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens” in Los Angeles.

Priming the public this way establishes a danger so great that ordinary – civilian – resources are an insufficient response. Military resources become the solution.

Emblematic of this tactic is Trump’s executive order deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C. He falsely declared a “crime emergency” in the capital so great as to “undermine critical functions of Government and thus the well-being of the entire Nation.”

The D.C. deployment has opened the door to Guard deployments in other cities. Deployment to multiple cities has the potential to normalize the presence of troops in communities nationwide.

Latin American conditions in the 1970s were far more dire. Yet there, too, rather than find political solutions, elected leaders sounded alarms and looked to the military.

The months before Chile’s coup in 1973 were marked by rationing, strikes and street protests.

That led the opposition-dominated lower house of Congress to pass a resolution calling on the military to “put an end to” the government of President Salvador Allende, whom they lacked sufficient votes to constitutionally impeach.

Although Congress and Allende had months to work for compromise solutions to the nation’s problems, both remained intransigent. With the resolution, Congress handed the military a blank check to intervene. The military took over just three weeks later.

Using the military as backup

A second tactic is to place military forces in prominent missions as backup for nonmilitary personnel. The expectation is that they will reinforce each other seamlessly.

The Trump administration’s deployment of Marines in Los Angeles required that they protect federal immigration agents without engaging in law enforcement. In practice, however, lines may not be so clear.

Military troops may be tasked into law enforcement support operations where they directly confront civilians. This happened in Los Angeles, where Marines detained a civilian who had entered an unauthorized zone. Such detention is by law the job of local law enforcement.

Yet more worrisome is when federal troops back up operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE, created after 9/11 to support domestic anti-terrorism efforts and enforce federal immigration laws, has broad territorial jurisdiction. It also has greater enforcement power and fewer use-of-force limitations than police. Its most striking methods – masked agents, arrests without court warrants – have brought comparisons to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo secret police.

At least 19 states have authorized National Guard deployments to collaborate with ICE in targeting illegal immigration. All this raises the question of what ICE methods military troops may absorb through the collaboration.

Argentina reflects a worst-case scenario of how the military can absorb practices from nonmilitary agents that erode its professionalism.

In the two years before the 1976 coup, the army was prepared to counter two guerrilla groups – Montoneros and ERP – that orchestrated bombings and attacked police and military installations. Yet senior officers were deeply divided over any collaboration with the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, a paramilitary group created by the civilian government that eliminated the government’s rivals.

The military repeatedly resisted the government’s requests to work with the AAA, considering it a loose cannon and competitor aligned with the police. As political violence escalated, public support for the military to take the lead in counterinsurgency grew.

The growing crisis galvanized an interventionist sector in the military, enabling the 1976 coup. Once in power, it adopted the AAA’s horrific methods, including enforced disappearance and clandestine murder. In short, the military eliminated the group and adopted its death squad methods.

Demanding political litmus tests

The third tactic may be the most debilitating within the military itself. It involves publicly shaming and firing military personnel for allegedly being woke.

The Trump administration seeks to eradicate wokeness from the military. Firings initially targeted officers at the highest ranks. Yet any misstep that can be deemed political – such as contradicting the president’s claims with intelligence assessments – appears to qualify for removal.

Yet while seeking to eliminate diversity, the tactic is likely to encourage a culture of institutional policing and concealment. This erodes military norms of merit-based promotion and professional trust.

In both Chile and Argentina, it was professedly apolitical officers who led the coups of the 1970s. Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet and Argentina’s Gens. Jorge Rafael Videla and Roberto Viola had established reputations as officers opposed to intervention.

Yet while their appearance of being apolitical facilitated promotion to the highest ranks, it was no guarantee of moderation.

On the eve of the coup in Chile, the CIA reported uncertainty that Pinochet would “actively support” other leaders of the coup in the military.

Yet two months later, Pinochet had not only taken charge but was plotting to eliminate rival officers by arrest and even assassination. He also created a specialized intelligence agency to carry out political repression.

Similarly, Argentina’s Videla and Viola were long viewed as moderates. The CIA reported that Argentine officials and business leaders preferred Videla lead the coup, believing his moderate stance would leave political parties and labor organizations “unchanged.”

Yet after coups brought them to power, they endorsed repression and presided over the shuttering of all representative institutions. Systematic repression through extrajudicial executions and thousands of enforced “disappearances” followed.

The dangers of a partisan military

To be sure, none of these tactics destine the United States to democratic breakdown or military takeover. But Americans ignore the partisan use of the armed forces at their peril.

Fortunately, for Argentina and Chile there was a pathway out of dictatorship. But it took decades of concerted work by democratic leaders and citizens to restore full rule of law and rebuild democratic institutions.

To this day, their armed forces remain tainted by the weight of their misrule and repression some 50 years ago. This is not a path that other democracies can afford to take.

Kristina Mani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Protests are becoming a routine part of public life in the United States. Since 2017, the number of nonviolent demonstrations has almost tripled, according to researchers with the nonprofit Crowd Counting Consortium.

And more people are joining than ever. The Black Lives Matter marches in 2020, after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, have been described as the largest nonviolent mobilization in U.S. history. The No Kings protests against Trump administration policies on June 14, 2025, were not far behind, with between 2 million and 4.8 million Americans protesting nationwide

What explains this surge of protest activity?

My research shows that polarization – the extent to which people dislike members of the opposing party – is a key driver. Today political polarization, as reflected by the ratings Americans give to the political parties, continues to be at its highest level since political scientists began using the measure in 1964.

I am an expert on political behavior, and my work analyzes how polarization shapes public life. In a recent article published in the journal Social Forces, I analyzed surveys conducted between 2014 and 2021 that asked Americans whether they had joined protests connected to Black Lives Matter, the climate movement or the tea party, the small-government movement that was active in the early 2010s.

These surveys, which include over 14,000 respondents, make it possible to see what separates people who protest from those who stay home.

The data points to a clear pattern: Anger at the other side motivates protest. People who rated the opposing party more negatively at one point in time were much more likely to take part in demonstrations in the years that followed.

Dislike for the other side spurs action

Importantly, I found that partisan animosity was a strong motivator for taking part in protests, even after taking people’s feelings about the issues into account. In the surveys, respondents were asked detailed questions about their views on the movements’ topics: for example, whether white Americans enjoyed advantages that Black Americans did not, or how serious a problem they thought climate change was and whether it was caused by human activity.

This allowed me to calculate how much protest activity was due to partisan anger and how much was simply a result of policy concerns. The results surprised me.

For the two higher-profile movements – Black Lives Matter and the tea party – partisan animosity mattered for protest a little more than half as much as people’s feelings about racial inequality or government spending, respectively. For climate protests, the effect of partisan anger was even greater. How people felt toward the “other side” mattered 2½ times more for their decision to protest than did concern about climate change.

This finding matters because it shows that polarization is not just about what people think. It also changes how they participate in politics.

What’s known as “affective polarization,” or the tendency for partisans to dislike and distrust each other, has already been shown to affect how people view U.S. political parties and their willingness to be friends across party lines. My study showed that this kind of division also increases people’s real-world engagement with politics.

When partisans feel threatened or angry at the opposing side, they don’t just complain about it. They organize, hit the streets and march.

More division, more marches

The polarized nature of protest also helps explain why some of today’s protests address multiple issues. The No Kings protests in June 2025, for instance, challenged a number of actions, including funding cuts to social programs, ICE deportations and the deployment of troops in Los Angeles.

But the “King” in question was always clear: President Donald Trump. Protesters may not have shared identical or extreme views on every issue, but they were united by their opposition to Trump.

Protest has long been an infrequent activity, but that’s changing. In the 2020 American National Election Study, nearly 1 in 10 Americans said they had joined a protest in the past year, the highest figure recorded on that survey since the question was first asked in 1976.

That level of participation makes protest one of the most visible ways Americans now engage in politics. As polarization remains high, there is every reason to expect it will continue – starting with another nationwide No Kings protest planned for Oct. 18, 2025.

The author has attended public events for social movements mentioned in this article. These experiences did not involve any funding, employment, or formal affiliation, and the analysis presented here is guided by academic standards of objectivity and evidence-based research.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Following unprecedented threats from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, major affiliate station owners Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcasting pressured Disney’s ABC to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air over his comments related to Charlie Kirk’s killing.

The suspension is a harbinger of what could happen under a fundamental restructuring of U.S. media that will take place if the proposed Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger is approved by the Trump administration.

The deal, first revealed on September 11, 2025, would erase one of the five remaining movie studios and concentrate oversight of two of the country’s most prominent newsrooms – CNN and CBS, both targets of the Trump administration’s ire – under one owner with strong ties to Donald Trump.

Based on research from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project, our analysis shows that Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery would gain control of more than a quarter of the US$223 billion U.S. media market, along with influence over film, television, streaming and the cloud infrastructure upon which digital media increasingly depends.

The combined entity would acquire nearly half of the cable television market, including HBO and CNN. The merger would nearly double Paramount’s share of the video streaming market, uniting HBO Max, Paramount+ and Discovery.

By combining two major Hollywood film studios, it would also capture nearly one-third of the film production market.

This is exactly the type of merger that U.S. antitrust agencies have historically scrutinized because of concerns that excessive market concentration gives too much power to a few companies.

In media markets, such concerns are pronounced: Concentration threatens media diversity and increases the risk of media bias and ideological manipulation.

A mega-conglomerate like Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery would control a vast share of U.S. viewership. Subject to pressure from or, worse, alignment with the Trump administration, the merged company could promote and protect the administration’s interests.

Cloud control

By combining media production and valuable brands such as Harry Potter, DC Comics and Barbie, the merged giant would gain great negotiating power with competing streaming companies, advertisers and distributors. The merged companies could also secure more lucrative streaming deals, better licensing windows and higher per subscriber and ad rates with cable providers.

The 2023 Hollywood writers and actors strikes opposed the exploitative impact of streaming and AI on creative workers’ compensation. The new media giant would wield significant bargaining power over those media workers.

The merger’s potential detrimental impact extends beyond film and television industries.

Paramount is helmed by David Ellison, and the merger is backed by his father, Larry Ellison. Ellison senior owns the world’s fifth-largest cloud provider, Oracle.

Cloud providers are the critical infrastructure for streaming platforms, ferrying digital content from streamers to viewers. As streaming becomes the dominant mode of media consumption, the Ellison family’s control over this infrastructure could give Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery another lever of power over its competitors.

Diversity denied

With potential size and reach to rival Disney and Comcast’s NBC Universal, Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery could become another massive media outlet with right-wing ties.

The proposed deal follows the Trump administration’s $1.1 billion cuts in public media funding. These cuts – affecting PBS, NPR and more than 1,500 affiliated local news stations across the country, all accused by Trump of “partisan bias” – effectively accelerate the ongoing demise of local, independent news.

Concurrently, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. has settled its dynastic succession, ensuring Fox remains a core channel for the American right.

If the merger is approved, Fox Corporation, the conservative Sinclair Broadcasting and Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery would control one-third of all U.S. media.

This consolidation would further cement the partisan media model driving deepening political polarization in the U.S., as public and local news media lose funding. The deal also would undermine already declining media independence, fundamental to holding the powerful – whether corporations or politicians – to account.

Wielding regulation

The Trump administration has not shied away from using antitrust law and communications regulation to exercise political control over media.

Before initiating its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount was acquired by David Ellison’s Skydance Media. Ahead of the government’s merger review, amid regulatory signals it could affect the review process, Paramount-owned CBS paid $16.5 million dollars to Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit Trump filed based on allegations of “deceptive” editing of an interview with his political opponent Kamala Harris. Editing of interviews is a standard editorial practice.

Shortly after, the merger was approved by the FCC with strict political conditions: hiring an ombudsman to oversee CBS’s reporting and eliminating all of the network’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

David Ellison accepted these conditions, promising to eliminate all of Paramount’s U.S.-based DEI programs. For the ombudsman role, he hired Kenneth Weinstein, former CEO of the conservative Hudson Institute and ambassador to Japan under the first Trump administration.

Since then, the Paramount CEO also has pursued Bari Weiss, a prominent conservative voice, to guide “the editorial direction” of the CBS news division. Ellison’s moves signal that editorial independence at CBS, and soon perhaps CNN, may be subject to ideological oversight.

Meanwhile, Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, has ties to Donald Trump going back to the first Trump administration. The New York Times in an April 2025 profile said that Ellison “may be closer to Mr. Trump than any mogul this side of” Elon Musk.

The senior Ellison has been playing a key role in negotiations over the future ownership of TikTok. His ties to Trump run deep enough to likely make him one of the main beneficiaries of the TikTok deal currently in negotiation between the United States and China.

Trump has shown an appetite for coercing media companies. For instance, ABC settled a Trump lawsuit in late 2024 with a $15 million donation to the as-yet-unbuilt Trump Library.

By placing two major news outlets in the hands of a family with ties to Trump, the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger would facilitate such control.

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Read more:
ABC’s and CBS’s settlements with Trump are a dangerous step toward the commander in chief becoming the editor-in-chief

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What Orbán did – but faster

This is the “Hungarian model” on speed.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, spent a decade asserting increasing control over that nation’s media.

The Trump administration is poised to accomplish the same in less than a year – and at greater scale.

In addition to helping allies buy a growing share of U.S. media, in his first eight months Trump also has managed to score conciliatory overtures from the nation’s tech billionaires, who fired fact-checkers at major social media platforms, curbed moderation of hateful content and asserted rigid editorial control over the op-ed pages at The Washington Post, one of the country’s most prominent newspapers.

If the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is approved and Larry Ellison joins Andreessen Horowitz as part of the impending TikTok deal, a movie studio, CBS, CNN, Fox, 185 Sinclair-owned TV stations and a major social media platform will have owners with strong ties to Trump.

We believe the promised benefits of a Paramount-Warner Bros. Disovery merger, including lower streaming prices, pale next to the damage it would do to media diversity and pluralism.

By acquiring greater control over film production, TV and streaming, the merger would dramatically reconfigure the very media institutions that shape U.S. culture and politics.

The Trump administration’s review of this merger may further cement the administration’s political control over the U.S. media.

This story has been updated to reflect developments in the status of Kimmel’s show.

Pawel Popiel receives funding from funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Dwayne Winseck receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Hendrik Theine receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Sydney Forde receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

House Democrats are going on the offense with tariffs and shutdown politics in swing districts, dropping TV ads against 10 vulnerable Republicans as Congress barrels toward an October government shutdown.

House Majority Forward, a nonprofit aligned with House Democratic leadership, is spending $3 million on broadcast TV and digital ads attacking Republicans on cost-of-living increases and cuts to Medicaid. Details of Tuesday’s ad buy were shared first with POLITICO.

“They promised to lower prices, but you’re not imagining it — Republican tariffs are making everything more expensive,” one of the ad’s narrator says, over flashing images of grocery items. “Juan Ciscomani voted to let Trump make tariffs even worse and voted to make healthcare even more expensive. Now, Republicans in Congress are threatening to shut down the government, causing economic chaos.”

Ciscomani, a Republican member first elected in 2022, holds an Arizona House seat that Donald Trump also narrowly won last year.

The ads come as Congress faces a government shutdown stalemate, after the Senate rejected dueling short-term government funding proposals from both parties on Friday.

They also preview Democrats’ attack lines against Republicans ahead of the midterms. Public polling finds most Americans disapprove of Trump’s tariff policies. But Republicans maintain an edge over Democrats when voters are asked who they trust more on the economy, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released over the weekend.

In addition to Ciscomani, the ads go after Reps. David Valadao of California, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn of Iowa, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.

The ad airing against Van Orden features a Wisconsin-based influencer, Kate Duffy. Styled after a social media post, it will air vertically on broadcast TV, a first for the group.

​Politics

Disney announced “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will resume airing on Tuesday, ending Kimmel’s short-lived suspension following comments the host made on his show about the killing of Charlie Kirk.

In a statement released Monday, Disney said it suspended Kimmel last week “to avoid inflaming a tense situation.” The company received intense pressure from Trump allies, including Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, over Kimmel’s comments.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” Disney said in the statement. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”

“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday,” the statement continued.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which operates nearly 40 ABC affiliates, said Monday evening that it will preempt Kimmel’s show on its stations when the show returns.

Kimmel’s suspension set off a wave of criticism from leaders in both parties who were concerned about political censorship.

Prior to Kimmel’s suspension, Carr condemned Kimmel’s comments and suggested that media companies who receive licensing from the FCC have “an obligation to operate in the public interest.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said last Wednesday in an interview.

Hours later on Wednesday, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcasting Group, two of the nation’s largest owners of local television stations, said they would preempt tapings of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” because of Kimmel’s comments. Nexstar Media Group is currently pursuing a billion-dollar merger with Tegna that would require FCC approval.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A handful of prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, warned that Carr could set a dangerous precedent and urged the Trump administration to be careful in pressuring a private company to influence its speech.

Democratic leaders in Washington and hundreds of artists and celebrities joined in condemning Kimmel’s suspension.

FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat in the agency’s leadership, welcomed Kimmel’s return to air and praised Americans who criticized the suspension.

“I am glad to see Disney find its courage in the face of clear government intimidation,” she said.

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, encouraged Nexstar and Sinclair to keep their pledge to preempt Kimmel when his show returns.

“Disney and ABC caving and allowing Kimmell back on the air is not surprising, but it’s their mistake to make,” Kolvet said in a social media post Monday. “Nextstar and Sinclair do not have to make the same choice.”

​Politics