When identity politics trumps the Constitution

The First Amendment is the latest casualty of the Republican Party's identity politics, and Trump's cult of personality. What can stop him?

This week, I wanted to write about how Donald Trump has used Charlie Kirk’s death to stage an alarming, party-wide and government-sponsored assault on the First Amendment and free and fair elections — and about Republican legislators’ complete capitulation to the president on the Constitution.

I ended up writing a longer essay about how we ended up in a place where group identity and partisan loyalty determine so much of the Republican Party's policy and orthodoxy, what it means for democracy that Trump can aggressively steamroll free elections and punish media companies for the content of their employees’ speech, and a little bit about a way out of this mess.

The piece is, as you might guess, a bit bleak. I try to liven it up with some memes and charts, but alas, there’s nothing funny about the death of democracy and the rule of law. Analysis is not always positive. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

So thank you for reading on this fine Friday. The events of the last…