"one critical error in the calculus of many who oppose Trump" Are there still people in the US that do not yet, after 12 months, understand that you cannot negotiate "rule of law" and "democracy" with this president? Will such slow thinking people read, comprehend and be convinced (fast) by 3000 words? Good Luck from the Netherlands.
"Ik ben meestal tegen sportboycots. Je doet hetzelfde als de autocraten die de het voetbal politiek misbruiken. In het geval van de VS begin ik te twijfelen. Groenland wordt niet ingenomen, maar de ICE-Gestapo schiet vrouwen door hun hoofd en sleurt vijfjarige peuters uit de opvang. Hoe kan je dan gaan voetballen? Boycotten kan alleen georganiseerd. Als Spanje, het VK, Scandinavië, Duitsland en Frankrijk thuisblijven, kunnen wij aansluiten. In je eentje boycotten is hopeloos."
Sadly the one mistake getting the attention was blaming Alex for carrying a holstered and licensed gun. I guess if you piss off the NRA you’ve crossed the line. Two decent honest CRIME FREE citizens of America were MURDERED BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION and whose standing up for Renee and Alex!
David. This piece is so strong and overwhelming (good) in its scope that the hope is that it is bruited as broadly as Paine’s work. Clarity imbued throughout with your calm fury which drives us on to more! This patriotic work of your ought to exist for all times as our new documents that bolster and amend and redescribe the foundation documents. If our America survives, your stuff will have broken a path through the evil jungle that encroaches more daily, hourly, and we are awakening too slowly-/especially Democrats in office. I write I talk I phone, and despair, and then, your writing is the light in the dark forest. .
Thanks, Larry. Just one small voice out here…but I do believe that all of us together are gaining ground and can ultimately win in the end. It’s not going to be easy. This year is going to be even rougher than it has been. But there are signs that regular Americans standing up for their rights is what will undo the extremists and the crooks.
Levi wrote from the narrow place where method and conscience meet. Trained as a chemist and forged by Auschwitz, he gave the world testimony that is at once forensic and moral: careful description, exact language, and relentless attention to how ordinary systems make the extraordinary possible.
Levi’s writing does not dramatize evil; it shows how bureaucracy, euphemism, and routine turn cruelty into administration. Faced with a United States in 2026 marked by growing concentrations of power, legal contortions, creeping restrictions on dissent, and an information environment that corrodes shared fact, Levi’s lesson is urgent and practical: learn the grammar of repression, hold to sober testimony, and defend the ordinary mechanisms of democracy before they are repurposed into instruments of domination.
Repression rarely arrives as spectacle. Levi’s central insight is that oppressive systems are built out of small, technical moves: classifications, forms, memos, rules, and minute reorderings of procedure. Each seems banal; each, in aggregation, remakes political life.
In 2026 the same logic appears in administrative orders that narrow rights, surveillance architectures embedded in everyday technology, emergency powers reinterpreted into permanence, and legalistic language that masks human consequences. Levi insists we attend to these mechanisms.
To resist repression is first to name how it operates: trace the chain of authority that produces a policy, map the bureaucratic pathways that implement it, and expose the routine decisions that normalize coercion.
That insistence on naming carries an epistemic as well as moral force. Levi’s testimony is deliberately sober. He refused melodrama because accuracy was the most effective weapon against denial and distortion. In an era of disinformation and rhetorical excess, his method is a strategy: document, verify, and preserve.
The quiet accumulation of evidence—archives of administrative acts, careful investigative reporting, recorded whistleblower testimony—chips away at propaganda’s gloss. Levi’s example teaches civil society that moral outrage without meticulous documentation is vulnerable; method without moral purpose is inert. The two together—moral seriousness and evidentiary rigor—are the necessary tools for holding power to account.
Language matters. Levi was alert to euphemism’s corrosive power. “Special measures,” “national security,” “streamlining”: these phrases do not merely describe; they authorize. When legalistic terms displace human realities, they create a moral fog that dulls public resistance. Levi’s remedy is linguistic clarity: translate bureaucratic phrases into their human effects, challenge sanitizing terminology, and insist that public discourse use plain language to name harms. In 2026, such clarity is a civic duty: once obscured, abuses spread more easily; once named, their legitimacy erodes.
Levi’s indictment is not only of leaders but of the technicians who make systems run. His pages implicate doctors, clerks, managers—professionals who obeyed rules and thereby sustained atrocity.
The contemporary parallel is unmistakable: lawyers who draft permissive memos, vendors who supply surveillance technologies, judges who defer to executive claim. Levi’s ethic places responsibility on professionals: conscience must be operative in every office and every laboratory. Protecting democracy means protecting whistleblowers, strengthening ethical codes, and building institutional safeguards that make complicity costly.
Perhaps Levi’s most urgent warning concerns normalization. Cruelty advances by repetition. Small exceptions become precedents; temporary powers calcify into habit. His work teaches vigilance against incrementalism: treat each administrative encroachment as part of a pattern, not as a one-off emergency.
Citizens must refuse the slow accretion of erosive measures—contest narrowings of speech and assembly, oppose legal reinterpretations that hollow rights, and guard against substituting security catchwords for democratic accountability.
But Levi is not only a diagnostician; he is a teacher of civic practice. He points toward remedies that are concrete and often tedious—precisely because the ordinary work of defense is rarely theatrical. Invest in institutions of verification: independent journalism, robust public archives, impartial courts, and transparent oversight bodies.
Promote civic education that trains people to recognize how rights are eroded in quotidian terms. Support solidarity networks—legal aid, mutual support, community organizing—that protect those targeted by repression. In short, marry moral courage with disciplined method.
Levi’s voice also stresses the spiritual side of resistance: the duty to remember correctly and to care for the truth even when it is painful.
That duty resists both sentimental appropriation of suffering and cynical instrumentalization of victims for political ends. His witness is a call to cultivate moral imagination: to see the person behind a policy, to translate procedure into consequence, and to refuse abstractions that dissolve responsibility.
Primo Levi’s writing offers no simple prophecy of events; it offers instead a clear, uncompromising program. Repression is technical; resistance must be technical and moral.
The United States in 2026 faces a choice: regard Levi’s lessons as abstruse historical curiosities or take them as a manual for civic defense. To follow him is to attend to the small things—language, paperwork, professional ethics, evidence—because those small things are the scaffolding of political life. If citizens act with Levi’s combination of precision and conscience, they preserve not only legal forms but the human realities those forms protect.
Levi’s warning is austere because it trusts ordinary judgment: it asks not for heroics but for steady, often unglamorous work. That steady work—documenting, naming, objecting, caring—builds the architecture that keeps democratic life from becoming another administrative nightmare. In that modest but exacting charge lies Levi’s power: a reminder that the preservation of freedom depends not on dramatic gestures alone but on disciplined attention to how governance is actually done.
When will those democrat "politicians" finally learn that "making a deal" with something like trump is useless because trump never ever respects a "deal" he made.
Why have u only talked about the democrats? No mention of the republicans who have the power to stop him and Have had it from the very beginning?I dont understand the viewpoint of your article. Its very odd to sound like the democrats have all the power to stop him themselves!Those EVIL republicans in congress are just as much to blame as he is.If they are so afraid bec hes threatening them and their families,why dont they all speak out together to the nation as a group and tell whats happening to them!! Then the administration can’t kill them and their families because they’ll be in the public eye and everybody will know everything !!!that would neuter the president pretty fast!
Of course they are. But they are, by and large, on his team. They will not be the ones to demand change. As the people of Minneapolis show…it is regular Americans standing up for their rights who will put a stop to the MAGA agenda and to Trump.
The best way to deal with weak congressional democrats is to overcome them. The opposition to ICE was so overwhelming that they had no place to go with their appeasement. They’re deeply in the mud of their irrelevance, spending days negotiating a budget that Trump will ignore. They were so proud of this accomplishment until the murderous lying MAGAs and the revulsion of the decent citizens snatched bipartisanship from them. We must continue the fight. Roll over the quisling democrats and destroy MAGA.
This traitor is a disciple of the devil. He cares for no one but himself. He worships power & the dollar bill. Just as Hitler, he is not going to stop. He may pause, but he will never give up. We must stop him. Look everyone, it is him or us!!! It is that simple! Get ready. Saddle up. Get your mind right. There is no staying on the sidelines. Unless you don’t care about your Family & loved ones. Unless you want to live like a slave. It will be challenging. It will be difficult. But, there is no alternative. The time has come. Americans before us have been in trials as such. They triumphed. Let’s go! It is our turn. On to Victory!!!
Another key fact: Hurt people hurt people hurt people.......until realizes their own behavior then decides to break the cycle within themselves..... which I was able to do. Just know that it doesn't happen overnight. It was only because I was practicing meditation time. The gift of meditation is that you were able to see yourself for what you really are. What I saw was my behavior, but also the fact that I did not know how to stop it. I learned
Totally agree. And people who are capable of informing themselves about the facts of this administration’s cruelty and corruption but don’t do so, are as complicit as those who understand the evil and support it. As my fifth grade teacher (a Dominican nun) taught us: willful ignorance is no excuse.
Honestly Andrew Todd, I believe that children learn/ abuse beginning in the womb. This coming from a 73-year-old woman who was abused in early childhood sexually by her perverted grandfather, the father of my mother and her sister, who both had the same symptoms as I. It's called borderline personality disorder. In a nutshell it's black and white Behavior.
When trump said that only his own morality could stop him, he was actually admitting that everything he is doing is immoral. He has no morality or integrity. He is just evil.
Psychopathy is what pure evil is. They are born pure evil. And they always go as far as you let them until they are stopped. They are dangerous toddlers throwing tantrums
What I learned through my experience is that there are thousands if not millions of children that have no clue they have been abused in early childhood. I was just lucky to have a really great therapist who recognized the symptoms in me
"one critical error in the calculus of many who oppose Trump" Are there still people in the US that do not yet, after 12 months, understand that you cannot negotiate "rule of law" and "democracy" with this president? Will such slow thinking people read, comprehend and be convinced (fast) by 3000 words? Good Luck from the Netherlands.
Update: I just heard on Dutch public radio that Philip Glass decided to not premier his new symphony in june in Kennedy Center. Note that here the old name is used for that center. https://www.npoklassiek.nl/klassiek/podium/36e769e1-baed-4986-b415-a5fd7e7d27ce/philip-glass-trekt-zijn-werk-terug-vanwege-trump . Either we will get slapped again with new tariffs, or Trump will discredit Glass as a low-class composer of uncomprehensible music (LOL), or both. Bottom line: here we don't discuss whether Trump is perhaps evil. We know that we are at war. The boycott of the world soccer tournament is already being discussed. https://www.parool.nl/sport/je-moet-spelers-en-trainers-na-de-wedstrijd-eigenlijk-geen-spreektijd-geven-de-kans-op-wartaal-is-te-groot~b1223cea/ see final paragraph, author Henk Spaan is a recognized soccer columnist. Because of paywall, quote:
"Ik ben meestal tegen sportboycots. Je doet hetzelfde als de autocraten die de het voetbal politiek misbruiken. In het geval van de VS begin ik te twijfelen. Groenland wordt niet ingenomen, maar de ICE-Gestapo schiet vrouwen door hun hoofd en sleurt vijfjarige peuters uit de opvang. Hoe kan je dan gaan voetballen? Boycotten kan alleen georganiseerd. Als Spanje, het VK, Scandinavië, Duitsland en Frankrijk thuisblijven, kunnen wij aansluiten. In je eentje boycotten is hopeloos."
Sadly the one mistake getting the attention was blaming Alex for carrying a holstered and licensed gun. I guess if you piss off the NRA you’ve crossed the line. Two decent honest CRIME FREE citizens of America were MURDERED BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION and whose standing up for Renee and Alex!
David. This piece is so strong and overwhelming (good) in its scope that the hope is that it is bruited as broadly as Paine’s work. Clarity imbued throughout with your calm fury which drives us on to more! This patriotic work of your ought to exist for all times as our new documents that bolster and amend and redescribe the foundation documents. If our America survives, your stuff will have broken a path through the evil jungle that encroaches more daily, hourly, and we are awakening too slowly-/especially Democrats in office. I write I talk I phone, and despair, and then, your writing is the light in the dark forest. .
Larry
Thanks, Larry. Just one small voice out here…but I do believe that all of us together are gaining ground and can ultimately win in the end. It’s not going to be easy. This year is going to be even rougher than it has been. But there are signs that regular Americans standing up for their rights is what will undo the extremists and the crooks.
Primo Levi has something to say.
Levi wrote from the narrow place where method and conscience meet. Trained as a chemist and forged by Auschwitz, he gave the world testimony that is at once forensic and moral: careful description, exact language, and relentless attention to how ordinary systems make the extraordinary possible.
Levi’s writing does not dramatize evil; it shows how bureaucracy, euphemism, and routine turn cruelty into administration. Faced with a United States in 2026 marked by growing concentrations of power, legal contortions, creeping restrictions on dissent, and an information environment that corrodes shared fact, Levi’s lesson is urgent and practical: learn the grammar of repression, hold to sober testimony, and defend the ordinary mechanisms of democracy before they are repurposed into instruments of domination.
Repression rarely arrives as spectacle. Levi’s central insight is that oppressive systems are built out of small, technical moves: classifications, forms, memos, rules, and minute reorderings of procedure. Each seems banal; each, in aggregation, remakes political life.
In 2026 the same logic appears in administrative orders that narrow rights, surveillance architectures embedded in everyday technology, emergency powers reinterpreted into permanence, and legalistic language that masks human consequences. Levi insists we attend to these mechanisms.
To resist repression is first to name how it operates: trace the chain of authority that produces a policy, map the bureaucratic pathways that implement it, and expose the routine decisions that normalize coercion.
That insistence on naming carries an epistemic as well as moral force. Levi’s testimony is deliberately sober. He refused melodrama because accuracy was the most effective weapon against denial and distortion. In an era of disinformation and rhetorical excess, his method is a strategy: document, verify, and preserve.
The quiet accumulation of evidence—archives of administrative acts, careful investigative reporting, recorded whistleblower testimony—chips away at propaganda’s gloss. Levi’s example teaches civil society that moral outrage without meticulous documentation is vulnerable; method without moral purpose is inert. The two together—moral seriousness and evidentiary rigor—are the necessary tools for holding power to account.
Language matters. Levi was alert to euphemism’s corrosive power. “Special measures,” “national security,” “streamlining”: these phrases do not merely describe; they authorize. When legalistic terms displace human realities, they create a moral fog that dulls public resistance. Levi’s remedy is linguistic clarity: translate bureaucratic phrases into their human effects, challenge sanitizing terminology, and insist that public discourse use plain language to name harms. In 2026, such clarity is a civic duty: once obscured, abuses spread more easily; once named, their legitimacy erodes.
Levi’s indictment is not only of leaders but of the technicians who make systems run. His pages implicate doctors, clerks, managers—professionals who obeyed rules and thereby sustained atrocity.
The contemporary parallel is unmistakable: lawyers who draft permissive memos, vendors who supply surveillance technologies, judges who defer to executive claim. Levi’s ethic places responsibility on professionals: conscience must be operative in every office and every laboratory. Protecting democracy means protecting whistleblowers, strengthening ethical codes, and building institutional safeguards that make complicity costly.
Perhaps Levi’s most urgent warning concerns normalization. Cruelty advances by repetition. Small exceptions become precedents; temporary powers calcify into habit. His work teaches vigilance against incrementalism: treat each administrative encroachment as part of a pattern, not as a one-off emergency.
Citizens must refuse the slow accretion of erosive measures—contest narrowings of speech and assembly, oppose legal reinterpretations that hollow rights, and guard against substituting security catchwords for democratic accountability.
But Levi is not only a diagnostician; he is a teacher of civic practice. He points toward remedies that are concrete and often tedious—precisely because the ordinary work of defense is rarely theatrical. Invest in institutions of verification: independent journalism, robust public archives, impartial courts, and transparent oversight bodies.
Promote civic education that trains people to recognize how rights are eroded in quotidian terms. Support solidarity networks—legal aid, mutual support, community organizing—that protect those targeted by repression. In short, marry moral courage with disciplined method.
Levi’s voice also stresses the spiritual side of resistance: the duty to remember correctly and to care for the truth even when it is painful.
That duty resists both sentimental appropriation of suffering and cynical instrumentalization of victims for political ends. His witness is a call to cultivate moral imagination: to see the person behind a policy, to translate procedure into consequence, and to refuse abstractions that dissolve responsibility.
Primo Levi’s writing offers no simple prophecy of events; it offers instead a clear, uncompromising program. Repression is technical; resistance must be technical and moral.
The United States in 2026 faces a choice: regard Levi’s lessons as abstruse historical curiosities or take them as a manual for civic defense. To follow him is to attend to the small things—language, paperwork, professional ethics, evidence—because those small things are the scaffolding of political life. If citizens act with Levi’s combination of precision and conscience, they preserve not only legal forms but the human realities those forms protect.
Levi’s warning is austere because it trusts ordinary judgment: it asks not for heroics but for steady, often unglamorous work. That steady work—documenting, naming, objecting, caring—builds the architecture that keeps democratic life from becoming another administrative nightmare. In that modest but exacting charge lies Levi’s power: a reminder that the preservation of freedom depends not on dramatic gestures alone but on disciplined attention to how governance is actually done.
When will those democrat "politicians" finally learn that "making a deal" with something like trump is useless because trump never ever respects a "deal" he made.
Why have u only talked about the democrats? No mention of the republicans who have the power to stop him and Have had it from the very beginning?I dont understand the viewpoint of your article. Its very odd to sound like the democrats have all the power to stop him themselves!Those EVIL republicans in congress are just as much to blame as he is.If they are so afraid bec hes threatening them and their families,why dont they all speak out together to the nation as a group and tell whats happening to them!! Then the administration can’t kill them and their families because they’ll be in the public eye and everybody will know everything !!!that would neuter the president pretty fast!
Of course they are. But they are, by and large, on his team. They will not be the ones to demand change. As the people of Minneapolis show…it is regular Americans standing up for their rights who will put a stop to the MAGA agenda and to Trump.
The best way to deal with weak congressional democrats is to overcome them. The opposition to ICE was so overwhelming that they had no place to go with their appeasement. They’re deeply in the mud of their irrelevance, spending days negotiating a budget that Trump will ignore. They were so proud of this accomplishment until the murderous lying MAGAs and the revulsion of the decent citizens snatched bipartisanship from them. We must continue the fight. Roll over the quisling democrats and destroy MAGA.
This traitor is a disciple of the devil. He cares for no one but himself. He worships power & the dollar bill. Just as Hitler, he is not going to stop. He may pause, but he will never give up. We must stop him. Look everyone, it is him or us!!! It is that simple! Get ready. Saddle up. Get your mind right. There is no staying on the sidelines. Unless you don’t care about your Family & loved ones. Unless you want to live like a slave. It will be challenging. It will be difficult. But, there is no alternative. The time has come. Americans before us have been in trials as such. They triumphed. Let’s go! It is our turn. On to Victory!!!
Phew. THIS is why I tell all my friends to read Rothkopf!
Another key fact: Hurt people hurt people hurt people.......until realizes their own behavior then decides to break the cycle within themselves..... which I was able to do. Just know that it doesn't happen overnight. It was only because I was practicing meditation time. The gift of meditation is that you were able to see yourself for what you really are. What I saw was my behavior, but also the fact that I did not know how to stop it. I learned
Totally agree. And people who are capable of informing themselves about the facts of this administration’s cruelty and corruption but don’t do so, are as complicit as those who understand the evil and support it. As my fifth grade teacher (a Dominican nun) taught us: willful ignorance is no excuse.
Honestly Andrew Todd, I believe that children learn/ abuse beginning in the womb. This coming from a 73-year-old woman who was abused in early childhood sexually by her perverted grandfather, the father of my mother and her sister, who both had the same symptoms as I. It's called borderline personality disorder. In a nutshell it's black and white Behavior.
The hardest place to look for the abuser who has been unconsciously "passed down" — is in the mirror😔
When trump said that only his own morality could stop him, he was actually admitting that everything he is doing is immoral. He has no morality or integrity. He is just evil.
Psychopathy is what pure evil is. They are born pure evil. And they always go as far as you let them until they are stopped. They are dangerous toddlers throwing tantrums
What I learned through my experience is that there are thousands if not millions of children that have no clue they have been abused in early childhood. I was just lucky to have a really great therapist who recognized the symptoms in me