The worst and the meekest

Weekend reads for February 1, 2025

Hi, everyone! Anand here. What a time we are living through. At least we’re able to live and think through it all together, in community. We have some intellectual treats below that we think might give you understanding, solace, and even some hope. Read on; hang in. — AG

We have two Substack Live events coming up next week that you won’t want to miss: Monday, February 3, at 12:30 PM we’ll have our regular conversation with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat (scroll all the way down for a rare special deal on her newsletter, Lucid, only for The Ink’s supporting subscribers). Then on Tuesday, February 4, also at 12:30 PM, we’ll be talking with legendary editor and journalist Tina Brown of Fresh Hell. To watch, download the Substack app and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device.

---

We hope you’re holding up, dear readers — we’ve gotten through another week of Trump 2.0, and that’s not nothing.

The second week of the second Trump presidency kicked off with an unprecedented assault by the administration on American institutions — an illegal and unconstitutional shutdown of federal funding that can only be understood as a second coup. As the week progressed, the resolutely unqualified Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel faced congressional questions, Elon Musk’s shadow appointees got underway with their Twitter-tested plan to cull the federal workforce, the Trumpian tariff program kicked off, and a deadly midair collision at Reagan National Airport underscored the ongoing threat to the functioning of the country’s critical infrastructure.

Through it all, we’re doing our best to find the resources that can illuminate these often dark times, and every Saturday we recommend those in this space called Weekend Reads, our weekly compilation of the readings from other publications that we believe are worth your time. This week, we’ve got reflections on the ongoing Trumpian plot against America, a look back at the legacy of Brexit, thoughts on the far-right push to resegregate the nation, and even some reasons for hope.

But before we get to our collection of links across the internet, at The Ink this week we’ve been doing some thinking about a core problem facing progressive and Democratic political communicators: the failure to seize the narrative and tell the better story, leaving an opening for fascists to own the day. That’s been painfully apparent over this past week, with Democratic leaders compliant or silent in the face of Trump and Musk’s coup. They can — and must — rise to the challenge.

The remedy is not to avoid reacting to Trump. He is, like, the president. The remedy, rather, is to live in more than mere reaction to him. It is to go on narrative offense.

Public-relations professionals will tell you that to own a news cycle, you need to get in front of the story. Successful political leaders know that to own public sentiment, you need to help people make meaning out of the things that shape their lives, whether everyday challenges or national crises. “To lead effectively,” Heather McGhee has told us here, “you have to really be in people’s lives in a way that helps them make meaning out of everyday life.”

Meaning doesn’t make itself, as you’ve heard us say many times. People need help connecting the dots of experience into a story. Such stories aren’t self-organizing.

---

---

Readings

Patriotic miseducation

“Patriotic education” — a merger of Stephen Miller’s fascism with Mike Pence’s fundamentalism — is both old and new. It is a return to the “great man” vision of history long taught (and still often taught) to our children, not to mention the biblical education that dominated American schools until the 1930s. But what once was an unexamined given of a white supremacist system is now a weapon, mobilized in explicit opposition to examination of slavery’s centrality in U.S. history. As Jean Guerrero writes in Hatemonger, her political biography of Trump commissar Stephen Miller, Trump’s intellectuals recognize the larger restructuring of knowledge necessary to the triumph of personality as power. [Slow Civil War]

The bloodless coup