As I’ve said before — the monster always come back one last time in the horror movie, so I have to assume that Trump is going to swoop in and do something dramatically anti-democratic before the 2026 midterms.
What that may be, I don’t know.
I assume whatever it is will be egregious and probably in some way superficially legal so Trump gets away with it.
This is when I note, again, that this fall could be an autocratic tipping point on way or another. It could be that the country could buckle and we have something akin to a civil war or a revolution.
But I have serious doubts about that. Blues just don’t have it in them to do such a thing, even if it might, in a sense, be necessary. But we’ll see.
A United States senator tried to catch a former special counsel in perjury today, and the whole thing came down to two letters: e-y-e.
On Tuesday, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri told Jack Smith he had the goods. Smith, Schmitt said, had secretly been in Atlanta for a Hawks game in February 2024. Smith said he hadn’t. Schmitt produced a poster board. The poster board was wrong. Smith had been at a college women’s game in Maryland, watching Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Hawks. Hawkeyes. That’s the scandal. Except the scandal isn’t what Schmitt thought it was.
What actually happened
Schmitt asked Smith whether he’d attended the Atlanta Hawks–Golden State Warriors game on February 3, 2024. The date mattered to Schmitt’s theory. It was the day before Fulton County DA Fani Willis admitted her relationship with Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on her Trump case. The insinuation was a secret Atlanta rendezvous between two prosecutors.
Smith said he had no recollection of being in Atlanta, and that he certainly hadn’t gone to a Hawks game. Schmitt offered him a moment to reconsider so he wouldn’t perjure himself, then said he thought Smith already had. He held up screenshots of texts from Smith’s staff about a basketball game. He called Smith a villain and a dirtbag.
Then Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked that Smith be shown the actual texts. They were about a University of Maryland women’s game against Iowa, Clark’s Hawkeyes, in Maryland. Not Atlanta. Not the NBA. Not Fani Willis. Somewhere between the texts and the poster board, “Hawkeyes” became “Hawks,” and nobody checked before a senator accused a man of a felony on national television.
The double-down
In a functioning information system, this is where the story ends. A senator gets embarrassed, his staff gets a talking-to, everyone moves on.
That isn’t what happened. Within hours, parts of the MAGA media world were running the clip as a victory. Benny Johnson told his followers Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers said Smith had “unraveled” under the weight of receipts he didn’t know existed.
The receipts said Iowa. They said Maryland. The receipts exonerated him. It didn’t matter.
The half-life of a lie
It’s tempting to call this “no shared reality.” I’ve said it myself. But that’s not quite right, and the difference matters.
Reality was shared just fine in that hearing room. The texts were on a board. Klobuchar read them correctly. The correction happened live, on camera, in the same five minutes as the accusation. Nobody who looks at those texts disputes what they say.
The problem isn’t that two sides see different facts. It’s that the accusation and the correction travel on different roads to different audiences. The clip of a senator shouting “perjury” is a great clip. The clip of a colleague patiently pointing out that Iowa is not Georgia is not. One gets shared; the other gets ignored. A certain number of people will now believe, for years, that Jack Smith lied under oath about a secret meeting in Atlanta. They will never see the poster board up close.
And here’s the part that should worry everyone, not just people who like Jack Smith: getting it wrong cost Schmitt almost nothing. For the audience he was playing to, being loud on the right side beat being right. When there’s no penalty for a false accusation, there’s no reason to check the staff work. Next time, it’ll be sloppier.
That incentive isn’t unique to one party. Every faction has its commentators who’d rather keep a good clip than issue a boring correction. But today, the pratfall belongs to Schmitt, and the doubling-down belongs to the people who cheered him on.
Hawkeyes
You can think whatever you want about Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Donald Trump. Reasonable people disagree about them. But on the one question Eric Schmitt chose to stake his credibility on, the record is not ambiguous. Smith told the truth. Schmitt didn’t read the texts.
The fix isn’t mystical. It’s the most boring virtue in journalism: check it before you say it. And when you get it wrong, say so as loudly as you said it the first time. Until that’s rewarded, expect more poster boards.
For variety of reasons, but public and private, I have a feeling 2027 is going to suuuuuuck. It’s going to be horrible. The chief issue is a lot of the shittier elements of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will kick in, causing a lot of heartache for poor people like me.
Meanwhile, if somehow, miraculously, Democrats don’t blow it and manage to win big in the 2026 midterms, there is always a risk that Trump will fuck with the outcome after the fact or simply not recognize it as legitimate.
And, of course, there’s the possibility that Trump will do something so horrible, so heinous that Democrats will actually get off their asses and impeach him. He won’t be convicted, of course, unless, I don’t know, he commits treason or murders someone live on TV.
Even then, given how corrupt our political system is, it would probably be iffy.
Anyway, there’s little I can do about any of this. I just have to hunker down and prepare.
Indications already suggest that, should Democrats regain control of at least the House, their oversight efforts may focus primarily on Cabinet officials rather than the president himself.
Historical patterns show that presidents have often faced scrutiny directed at subordinates rather than personal removal. The constitutional impeachment process requires a simple majority in the House to impeach and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict and remove. President Trump was impeached twice—once in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and again in 2021 on a charge of incitement of insurrection—yet the Senate acquitted him on all counts both times, falling short of the required supermajority.
Experience with this administration has demonstrated a willingness to test institutional boundaries further than many observers anticipated. Should Democrats assume control of the House in 2027, it is reasonable to expect that any significant escalation beyond prior controversies could trigger formal investigations. Among potential grounds, treason stands out as the most constitutionally explicit. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason narrowly: “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Conviction requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or a confession in open court. The Framers deliberately constrained the offense to prevent its use as a political weapon.
Even a charge of that gravity would confront the same structural barrier that has protected every impeached president to date: the difficulty of securing a two-thirds Senate vote for conviction. Actions that in another era might have been treated as disqualifying—such as the unauthorized disclosure of classified information—would likely remain subject to intense partisan division rather than bipartisan consensus for removal.
American political institutions have so far shown limited capacity or willingness to confront the president directly through the impeachment mechanism. Looking ahead, the more consequential question concerns the period after the current administration ends. That transition will test whether constitutional norms, separation of powers, and liberal-democratic practices reassert themselves, or whether the political realignments of recent years produce lasting changes in the character of American governance.
Even President Abraham Lincoln, amid the Civil War, did not impose martial law for the purpose of disrupting free and fair elections. While Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and established martial law in limited areas (including parts of Kentucky in 1864), his proclamations explicitly provided that these measures “will not be deemed or taken to interfere with the holding of lawful elections.” The 1864 presidential election proceeded on schedule; Lincoln insisted on holding it despite unfavorable wartime conditions and personal political risk, viewing the continuation of democratic processes as central to the Union cause.
Today, serious discussion has arisen about the possibility of extraordinary executive actions—including speculation about martial law—ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Concerns persist regarding the integrity of future elections. Although the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has not been enacted into law (having passed the House in various forms but stalled in the Senate), related state-level measures requiring documentary proof of citizenship or stricter identification have advanced in multiple jurisdictions.
Under these circumstances, some observers anticipate that the administration may pursue significant pre-election measures. Declaration of martial law is frequently cited as one potential option. Legally, however, a president lacks authority to cancel or suspend federal elections. Election dates are fixed by statute and the Constitution; only Congress can alter them. Martial law—itself a contested and rarely invoked power with no clear statutory basis for nationwide application—does not confer the ability to override these constitutional and statutory frameworks. Historical precedent, Supreme Court rulings limiting military authority over civilian functions (such as Duncan v. Kahanamoku), and analyses of emergency powers confirm that elections have continued through prior wars and crises.
Any attempt to cancel elections would likely provoke profound institutional, political, and public resistance, potentially escalating into severe domestic conflict. A purely symbolic or power-asserting declaration of martial law, absent a genuine and overwhelming public-safety justification, would also carry substantial political costs. Decision-making in this domain remains difficult to predict with certainty.
In short, while historical practice and constitutional design strongly constrain the use of martial law or emergency powers to interfere with elections, vigilance regarding electoral integrity remains warranted as the 2026 midterms approach.
I’ve been reading a great book about the very, very end of WW2 in Europe and the telling thing to me from reading the book is how many fucking Nazis just drifted back into the woodwork.
Nothing happened to them, for the most part.
They did all these horrible things and, lulz, they went back to living a normal life.
And, I think, the same thing is going to happen to a lot of MAGA motherfuckers after the Trumplandia era is over. Trump will (hopefully) leave office and a lot of people whose claim to fame is sucking Trump’s cock will continue to go about their business as if nothing happened.
I think some of it is it’s unlikely — I hope at least — that things will get so bad that we’ll have to have de-MAGAification just like there was de-Nazification. As it stands, there just isn’t the will to fix all the things that Trump broke.
So, in that sense, there is definitely going to be a Before Trump and an After Trump in American political life. There’s no going back to what we had during the Obama era.
To some extent, America is now a lot closer to being a white Christian ethnostate than it was before Trump. The real question, of course, is what happens after Trump.
Will it all become moot because of RSI — FOOM — ASI? Will our new ASI overlord replace Trump as our North Star? I dunno. I just dunno. Anything is possible, I guess.
When people imagine a war between Russia and NATO, they tend to imagine the wrong thing. Tanks pouring through the Suwałki Gap. Russian missiles striking bases in Germany. American aircraft fighting Russian fighters over the Baltic. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear escalation. It is an understandable picture because it resembles the wars we know how to think about: one side attacks, the other side responds, and eventually somebody wins or loses.
But that may obscure the more interesting strategic problem. Russia does not necessarily have to defeat NATO in a conventional war to achieve an enormously important geopolitical victory. It may not even want such a war. A much cheaper and potentially safer strategy would be to steadily weaken the political cohesion on which NATO’s military power ultimately depends.
The distinction matters because NATO is an unusual military organization. Its strength doesn’t principally come from the armies of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia or even Poland. It comes from the promise that attacking one of those countries means acquiring all the others as enemies. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty turns dozens of separate national militaries into something approximating a single deterrent because an adversary must assume that aggression against one member could eventually bring American, British, French, German, Polish and other forces into the conflict.
That means NATO has an extraordinary amount of military power but also a potential political vulnerability. The entire arrangement depends upon adversaries believing that the members will act together when the moment comes.
Russia therefore faces two very different strategic questions. The first is: Can Russia defeat NATO? The answer would involve armies, aircraft, logistics, industrial production and eventually nuclear weapons. It is an extraordinarily dangerous proposition.
The second question is subtler: Can Russia make NATO members doubt one another?
That is a much more interesting question.
NATO itself increasingly describes Russian activity in these terms. At a September 19 meeting of NATO military chiefs in Copenhagen, Military Committee chairman Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone described recent airspace violations, drone incidents and hybrid activities as attempts to “test Allied resolve.” He also said Russian investment in what NATO calls cognitive warfare is intended to undermine trust and weaken Alliance unity. That is NATO’s interpretation of Russian behavior rather than an independently provable window into Kremlin decision-making, but it is revealing of the problem Alliance planners believe they face.
The European Union has reached a similar assessment. It says Russian-linked hybrid activity since the invasion of Ukraine has included sabotage, cyberattacks, interference operations, disruption of infrastructure and information manipulation, and describes the broader campaign as seeking to destabilize European states and undermine support for Ukraine. Recent EU statements have specifically characterized these actions as attempts to produce fear and distrust within European societies. Moscow has repeatedly rejected accusations that it is waging such a hybrid campaign.
This is where the concept of the “gray zone” becomes important. A conventional invasion produces clarity. If Russian armored units crossed the Polish border tomorrow morning, there would not be much philosophical debate about whether Poland had been attacked. NATO governments would still have enormous decisions to make, but identifying the event would not be particularly difficult.
Hybrid confrontation is almost the opposite. Its strategic usefulness often comes from uncertainty.
A telecommunications cable mysteriously breaks. A railway system experiences a cyberattack. A warehouse supplying Ukraine catches fire. GPS signals disappear over part of the Baltic. An unidentified drone crosses a border. A Russian aircraft briefly enters NATO airspace. A ship behaves aggressively toward another country’s military aircraft. A political information campaign amplifies an existing domestic disagreement.
None of those events looks like the beginning of World War III.
That is precisely the point.
A 2026 CSIS analysis describes Europe as occupying a gray zone between peace and war in which Russian cyber and information operations can erode European cohesion while staying below the threshold that would reliably provoke a conventional military response. Whether every suspected incident is attributable to Moscow is a separate evidentiary question, and attribution is often one of the central difficulties. But strategically, ambiguity itself can be useful.
Consider the difference between destroying a NATO military unit and creating an argument among NATO governments.
Destroying the unit requires weapons, exposes the attacker to retaliation and produces an obvious victim. Creating the argument can be dramatically cheaper. If Poland believes an incident was deliberate while another NATO government calls for further investigation, Russia has learned something about Alliance decision-making. If one government demands retaliation while another fears escalation, the political disagreement becomes almost as important as whatever physical damage occurred.
That suggests a different way of thinking about Russian probing around NATO’s borders.
The objective does not necessarily have to be territorial gain. The objective may be information.
How quickly does NATO respond?
Which governments hesitate?
What level of provocation produces a coordinated response?
What level produces arguments?
How much uncertainty is necessary before public opinion begins opposing escalation?
What happens if an incident kills nobody? What happens if it kills one person? What happens if Moscow says it was accidental? What happens if responsibility cannot immediately be established?
These are questions that can potentially be explored without ever ordering an armored division across a NATO border.
And that is why a hypothetical Russian attack on the Baltic states would make more strategic sense as the culmination of such a process than as its beginning.
Imagine that years of increasingly aggressive probing had convinced Moscow that NATO was politically brittle. Perhaps governments repeatedly argued about attribution. Perhaps American leaders signaled reluctance to become involved in small European confrontations. Perhaps European publics increasingly concluded that incidents around the Baltic were not worth risking a larger war. Perhaps NATO responses consistently arrived late enough that Russia developed confidence it could create a fait accompli before the Alliance made a decision.
Only then does something like the Suwałki Gap become truly tempting.
The military objective might still be limited: sever the land connection between Poland and the Baltic states, seize some territory or manufacture some supposed security crisis involving Kaliningrad. But the strategic objective would be much larger.
Russia would be asking NATO the most important question NATO can ever be asked:
Do you really mean it?
Suppose Russian forces occupied a small amount of Lithuanian territory and immediately stopped. Moscow announces that it has no intention of proceeding farther. It proposes negotiations. It warns that any NATO attack on Russian forces could produce catastrophic escalation. It perhaps puts nuclear forces on heightened alert for emphasis.
Suddenly NATO’s overwhelming aggregate military superiority becomes almost secondary.
The real battle takes place in Washington, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, London, Rome, Ankara and the other Allied capitals.
Is recovering that territory worth a European war?
Is it worth risking Russian missile attacks?
Is it worth losing thousands of soldiers?
Is it worth even a small possibility of nuclear escalation?
That is the Russian victory condition that deserves more attention.
Not Russian tanks reaching Paris.
Not the conquest of Poland.
Not recreating the Soviet Union.
Rather, a situation in which NATO possesses the military capability to reverse Russian aggression but cannot assemble the political will to use it.
If that happened once, the consequences would extend far beyond whichever patch of territory was originally contested. Estonia would immediately have to reconsider what NATO protection actually meant. So would Latvia and Lithuania. Poland would begin making decisions on the assumption that collective defense might fail. Finland and Sweden would reconsider their security calculations. Countries farther west would confront the same uncomfortable question from the opposite direction: if the guarantee failed once, what exactly were they obligated to risk the next time?
Article 5 would still exist on paper.
But deterrence operates primarily in people’s heads.
Once adversaries ceased believing in it, NATO could possess thousands of aircraft, tanks, ships and nuclear weapons while being strategically weaker than it had been before the crisis.
That helps explain why NATO leaders react so strongly even to incidents that appear militarily minor. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said this month that Russia wants to divide the Alliance and reduce its support for Ukraine; NATO’s public position is that the response should therefore be solidarity rather than reciprocal hesitation. Again, this is NATO’s stated assessment of Russian intent, not neutral proof of every alleged Russian operation. But it illustrates how Alliance leaders understand the contest: unity itself has become part of the battlefield.
There is an irony here. If weakening NATO is indeed an important Russian goal, many Russian actions since 2022 have produced the opposite short-term result. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. European defense budgets have increased substantially. NATO has reinforced its eastern flank. Germany is permanently stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania. The Alliance has expanded its planning for infrastructure resilience, cyberattacks, hybrid warfare and rapid reinforcement.
This doesn’t mean the political strategy has disappeared. It means the contest has become recursive.
Russia probes NATO cohesion.
NATO responds by demonstrating cohesion.
Russia observes that response and adjusts.
NATO changes its defenses again.
The danger is that both sides can gradually climb an escalation ladder while believing they are merely signaling.
And that brings us to the deepest problem with the idea that Russia might want to weaken NATO rather than fight it: a strategy designed to avoid war can accidentally produce one.
Gray-zone operations work because they hover near boundaries. But boundaries are not always visible. One country’s warning is another country’s provocation. One military sees a drone approaching critical infrastructure and shoots it down. Another military interprets the shootdown as escalation. A cyberattack unexpectedly shuts down a hospital. A missile that was supposedly intended for Ukraine lands several kilometers inside NATO territory. Soldiers die.
Suddenly governments are making decisions that neither side expected them to make.
This may be the central paradox of NATO-Russia relations in the coming years. Moscow has strong reasons not to fight NATO directly. NATO has equally strong reasons to avoid a war with Russia. Yet precisely because outright war is so unattractive, competition gets pushed into the ambiguous territory immediately below it.
That territory is becoming crowded.
Sabotage. Cyber operations. Drones. Electronic warfare. Airspace incursions. Information operations. Infrastructure incidents. Maritime confrontations. Political intimidation.
The temptation is to look at each one individually and conclude that it isn’t serious enough to matter.
But perhaps that is the wrong unit of analysis.
The strategic question isn’t necessarily whether Russia can win any particular confrontation.
It is whether, after enough confrontations, NATO becomes a little slower, a little more divided and a little less certain that its members will take enormous risks for one another.
Because the greatest Russian victory over NATO would not require defeating a single American division.
It would occur the moment Russia became convinced that it didn’t have to.
I can’t believe that Trump, that piece of shit, is talking about not just shutting down the Kennedy Center, but tearing it down. My fear is there will be an “accidental” fire one night and we’ll wake up to the Kennedy Center just being…gone.
If we had any gumption as a country, we would surround the building, occupy it, until Trump fucking backed down. But, alas, we just don’t have the grit to do such a form of direct action.
Oh well. The Trump Revolution rumbles along and we still have no idea what will be left to save once it’s done.
Now that SCOTUS, for once, has done the right thing and not fucked with mail in voting, I can only assume Trump will, in some weird last gasp, try again to fuck with the voting in the 2026 midterms.
I don’t know how exactly he would do it, but he’s going to try.
I’m not one of those who thinks he will try to outright cancel the midterms. Even he knows he doesn’t have that much power, but…still. He’s very clever and I could see him doing something nefarious that would fuck with the midterms to the point that they were not free and fair.
Something remarkable has happened in artificial intelligence over the past several days. Some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems are asking to slow down. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for “pacing the frontier”—deliberately giving safety research, monitoring, and institutions more time to catch up with rapidly improving AI capabilities. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk have publicly supported the basic idea. Major laboratories are discussing independent safety evaluation, increased transparency, and mechanisms for preventing competitive pressures from pushing everyone into a race that none of them necessarily wants to run at maximum speed. These are not environmental activists demanding that an oil company stop drilling, nor are they outsiders chaining themselves to the gates of a laboratory. They are the people running the laboratories.
Almost immediately, however, the most powerful Republican leaders in Washington have responded with some version of: not so fast on slowing down. President Donald Trump was asked on September 13 whether AI companies should slow development or face greater regulation. His answer centered not on the safety concerns being raised by AI researchers, but on China. “We’re leading China in AI,” Trump told reporters. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.” Trump allowed that “we could put guardrails” around the technology, but then dismissed some of the more serious warnings as coming from “very negative forces” raising scenarios that, in his words, “won’t happen.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has taken a somewhat more measured position, but his practical conclusion is similar. Johnson acknowledges that some safety measures are necessary. He has spoken about preventing AI from “running away” and says the issue is a priority. Yet when confronted with calls for Congress to intervene quickly, Johnson said lawmakers should “resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium.” He suggested that AI companies themselves can stop or slow their work and said he would prefer industry leaders to assume primary responsibility rather than having Congress impose the solution. Johnson also emphasized the same geopolitical concern as Trump: slowing American AI too much, he warned, could allow China to gain an advantage and thereby create a national-security threat.
This position is consistent with the broader policy of the Trump administration. A June executive order created mechanisms through which developers can voluntarily provide the federal government early access to certain frontier models for evaluation and cybersecurity work. But the same order goes out of its way to say that nothing in it should be interpreted as creating mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirements for developing or releasing new AI models. The administration wants evaluation. It wants cooperation. It wants cybersecurity. What it does not appear to want is a government speed limit on the frontier.
Perhaps that will prove to be the correct judgment. Perhaps the AI laboratories can police themselves. Perhaps the most extreme warnings are indeed exaggerated. Perhaps competition among American companies, combined with voluntary safety agreements and targeted government oversight, will turn out to be enough. But anyone who remembers the political aftermath of Sandy Hook should recognize another possibility. We may be watching a policy window begin to close almost as soon as it opened.
On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty children and six educators. The political response was immediate. There are moments in American politics when an event seems sufficiently horrifying that the normal rules briefly disappear. Positions that appeared immovable suddenly look negotiable. Politicians previously reluctant to discuss an issue begin demanding action. Public attention becomes overwhelming. Something that had been politically impossible on Wednesday can appear nearly inevitable by Friday. Sandy Hook created such a moment.
President Barack Obama made gun legislation one of the central priorities of the beginning of his second term. Families of Sandy Hook victims traveled to Washington. Senators began negotiations. The resulting Manchin-Toomey proposal would have expanded background checks for commercial gun sales. It was hardly revolutionary gun-control legislation, and public support for the underlying policy was extraordinary. In May 2013, Pew Research Center found that 81 percent of Americans favored background checks for private gun sales and gun-show purchases. Remarkably, the topline number was essentially identical among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Even after the Senate legislation itself became politically contested, 73 percent of Americans still wanted Congress to pass a background-check bill.
And yet the legislation died. On April 17, 2013—barely four months after twenty children were murdered at Sandy Hook—the Manchin-Toomey amendment received 54 votes in the Senate and 46 against. It had a majority, but it needed 60 under the procedure being used. The proposal failed. The extraordinary national moment produced by Sandy Hook did not disappear instantly. States including Connecticut enacted substantial reforms, executive actions followed, and gun-control organizations continued their work. But the federal window had effectively closed. By the end of 2013, Pew observed that the overall gun debate had already begun drifting back toward its previous political equilibrium. The horror remained. Public support for background checks remained broad. But the extraordinary sense that Congress simply had to do something had dissipated. Major federal gun-safety legislation would not finally pass until the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in June 2022, following another horrifying elementary-school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas. Nearly a decade had passed.
That sequence deserves considerably more attention in the AI debate than it is receiving, because political windows do not remain open simply because the underlying problem remains dangerous. They close. Public alarm fades, legislators find other priorities, industries organize their opposition, and proposals that seemed urgent become subjects for another committee hearing or another study. A danger can remain exactly as serious while the political willingness to address it steadily disappears.
The most striking similarity between the gun debate after Sandy Hook and the AI debate today is therefore not that guns and artificial intelligence present similar dangers. They plainly do not. The similarity is the transition from abstract agreement to concrete policy. Almost everyone can agree with an abstract noun: safety, responsibility, guardrails, common sense. After Sandy Hook, one could find politicians across the ideological spectrum saying that children should be protected and dangerous people should not have access to firearms. That broad agreement became much less useful once legislators had to answer the next question: what law, exactly, are you willing to vote for? That was where political consensus evaporated.
Something similar may now be beginning with AI. Trump says guardrails may be appropriate. Johnson says guardrails are necessary. The AI companies say safety is important. Democrats say safety is important. Republicans say safety is important. China presumably does not want uncontrolled AI systems destroying Chinese infrastructure any more than Americans want them destroying American infrastructure. In the abstract, then, nearly everyone supports “AI safety.” The meaningful question is what happens when safety costs something.
What happens when a laboratory has a model ready to train and an independent evaluator says the experiment should wait six weeks? What happens when a company has spent several billion dollars preparing a training run and a federal regulator says it cannot proceed? What happens when OpenAI wants to continue while Anthropic wants to pause, or when Anthropic slows down while Google does not? What happens if the leading American companies agree to exercise restraint but intelligence officials announce that a Chinese laboratory may be six months away from a comparable breakthrough? At that point, AI safety stops being an aspiration and becomes a policy. Policies impose constraints, and constraints are precisely where political agreement tends to disappear.
Trump has already identified the argument that could become the most powerful weapon against mandatory AI safety regulation: China. It is an extremely potent argument because, unlike some political talking points, it describes a genuine problem. The United States and China are engaged in strategic competition over artificial intelligence. Frontier AI may eventually affect intelligence gathering, cyberwarfare, weapons development, biotechnology, economic productivity, and military command systems. No American president can casually ignore the possibility that the United States might voluntarily slow its development while China continues racing forward. Dario Amodei himself has acknowledged how difficult this problem is, because the strategic rewards for ignoring an international slowdown could be enormous.
Trump is therefore identifying a legitimate dilemma. The danger is that a legitimate dilemma can become a convenient excuse. If “China might get ahead” becomes sufficient reason to reject mandatory safety measures, then almost no safety measure will survive. The more powerful AI becomes, the more strategically important it becomes, and the more strategically important it becomes, the more dangerous it appears to slow down. Greater AI capability could perversely produce less willingness to regulate it.
Consider where that logic leads. Suppose a frontier system becomes dramatically better than humans at offensive cybersecurity. Should development be slowed while researchers determine whether it can be controlled? The answer could be that China might get ahead. Suppose a system becomes exceptionally capable at biological design. Again, China might get ahead. Suppose autonomous AI researchers become capable of meaningfully accelerating AI development itself. Once again, China might get ahead. If the response to every dangerous capability is identical, then “we cannot let China win” ceases to be an argument about balancing risks and becomes an argument that no amount of risk can ever justify slowing down. That is no longer ordinary risk management. It is the logic of an arms race.
This is where Sandy Hook becomes useful—not as an analogy between the technologies, but as an analogy between political processes. After Sandy Hook, one of the central arguments against additional gun restrictions was that regulation would impose costs on law-abiding Americans without preventing determined criminals from obtaining weapons. A criminal could still acquire a gun illegally, so regulation could not guarantee safety, and therefore additional rules might merely burden people who followed the law. It is possible to argue endlessly about the merits of that reasoning in firearm policy, but its structural resemblance to the emerging AI argument is striking.
China might ignore American rules. Open-source developers might ignore them. A rogue laboratory might ignore them. Other countries might ignore them. Therefore, the argument goes, responsible American frontier laboratories should not be constrained. In both debates, imperfect enforcement threatens to become an argument against enforcement itself. Unless a regulation can eliminate the danger everywhere, its inability to eliminate the danger everywhere is offered as a reason not to reduce it anywhere. That is an extraordinarily high standard to demand from public policy, and almost no regulation could survive it.
The comparison with gun politics becomes even more intriguing when one notices where it breaks down. After Sandy Hook, the firearms industry was not asking Congress to slow gun sales. The National Rifle Association was not demanding tougher federal regulation of itself. Gun manufacturers were not going on television saying that they were moving too quickly and needed Washington to establish a common framework preventing competitors from behaving irresponsibly. Yet something close to that is happening with artificial intelligence. The leaders of major frontier laboratories are publicly acknowledging that the competitive dynamics of their own industry may be unsafe. Several have endorsed slowing development enough for safety systems to catch up.
This creates an extraordinary political paradox. Imagine that after Sandy Hook, several of the largest firearms manufacturers had gone to Congress and said that the competitive structure of their industry made voluntary restraint difficult, that they feared where the market was heading, and that they wanted enforceable standards applying equally to all major companies. Then imagine that congressional leadership responded that these companies were free to restrain themselves whenever they wished. That hypothetical contains something close to the contradiction now emerging around frontier AI.
Johnson’s argument—that the laboratories can simply slow themselves down—is perfectly logical if each laboratory operates independently. But that is precisely what the laboratory leaders say is not happening. Their concern is a coordination problem. If Anthropic slows down while OpenAI accelerates, Anthropic loses. If OpenAI slows while Google accelerates, OpenAI loses. If all three exercise restraint while another competitor continues, the competitor gains. The problem is not necessarily that the executives personally want to race recklessly. The problem is that they inhabit a system that rewards whichever participant races fastest. Government exists, in part, to solve exactly these kinds of collective-action problems. A speed limit would be fairly useless if every driver were simply invited to choose whatever speed seemed responsible.
There is nevertheless an obvious attraction to the Trump-Johnson approach. It avoids bureaucracy and reduces the danger of placing enormously consequential technical decisions in the hands of legislators who may understand the technology poorly. It decreases the possibility that regulation will freeze today’s market leaders permanently into place and allows safety systems to evolve quickly rather than waiting for Congress. It also avoids creating a powerful government licensing regime over one of the most important technologies of the century. Those are serious concerns and deserve serious consideration.
One should also be wary when enormous corporations ask to be regulated. Large incumbents sometimes favor regulations they are uniquely capable of satisfying. A federal frontier-model licensing regime requiring hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance infrastructure could improve public safety while conveniently making it much harder for smaller competitors to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or other existing giants. There are legitimate libertarian, economic, and technological arguments for moving cautiously. But “move cautiously when regulating” is different from “leave the decision to slow down entirely to the companies engaged in the race.” The former is prudence. The latter is itself a major policy choice. It means accepting voluntary self-regulation as the principal mechanism protecting the public from technologies that the developers themselves increasingly describe as potentially catastrophic.
Sandy Hook also revealed another unpleasant feature of democratic politics: public attention has a half-life. Immediately after catastrophe, almost everything seems possible. Four months later, considerably less seems possible. A year later, politicians have moved on. The underlying danger may not have changed at all. What changed was attention.
AI may now be experiencing an unusual inversion of that pattern. There has not yet been a Sandy Hook-scale AI catastrophe. Instead, capability advances, unsettling incidents, resignations by researchers, and increasingly serious warnings from laboratory leaders have created something resembling a pre-crisis policy window. That is rare. Normally governments receive warnings, postpone difficult decisions, and eventually regulate after something terrible happens. Here, at least in theory, we have an opportunity to attempt the reverse.
We can establish institutions before the disaster. We can determine dangerous capability thresholds before one is crossed accidentally. We can create reporting requirements before the incident everyone later wishes had been reported. We can establish independent evaluators before corporate and national competition becomes too intense to permit them. We can begin negotiating international agreements before the United States and China both possess systems whose development neither side can adequately monitor or verify.
Or we can wait. Waiting has enormous political advantages. Nobody gets blamed for slowing innovation. Nobody gets blamed for losing to China. Nobody has to decide precisely what constitutes a dangerous frontier model. Nobody has to create a new regulator. Nobody has to explain why a multibillion-dollar training run was postponed. If nothing goes wrong, waiting looks wise. The trouble is that this asymmetry works only until something does.
The most sobering aspect of the Sandy Hook aftermath was not that Americans disagreed about guns. Americans had disagreed about guns for decades. It was that even a moment of extraordinary agreement could evaporate without producing the federal legislation many people believed was inevitable. Twenty children had been murdered. The president was personally lobbying senators. Victims’ families were walking the halls of Congress. More than eight in ten Americans supported expanded background checks. A bipartisan compromise received a majority vote in the United States Senate. And still the legislative effort collapsed.
That is what political drift looks like. It rarely begins with a dramatic announcement that nothing will ever be done. It sounds much more reasonable than that. We need more study. We need consensus. Industry should lead. We cannot move hastily. The proposal is imperfect. The other side will not cooperate. Now is not the right time. Eventually an urgent problem becomes an ordinary problem, and ordinary problems can remain unsolved for decades.
This is the danger in the comments from Trump and Johnson. Neither man is saying that AI safety is irrelevant. In some respects that would actually be politically easier to confront. Instead, both are accepting the principle while resisting the mechanism. Trump says there can be guardrails, but emphasizes winning the AI race and dismisses some warnings as scenarios that will not happen. Johnson says safety measures are necessary, but rejects an emergency congressional moratorium and suggests the industry itself should assume the leading role. That may sound like a temporary disagreement over methods. History suggests it can become something considerably more consequential.
After Sandy Hook, the question rapidly shifted from whether the country should do something to whether Congress should enact this particular restriction, this particular background-check requirement, or this particular compromise. Once the debate reached that second stage, the coalition supporting action fractured. Artificial intelligence may now be entering exactly the same political phase. Almost everyone supports AI safety. The argument is becoming whether safety should ever be allowed to compel delay; whether independent evaluations should merely advise companies or possess actual authority; whether laboratories should disclose dangerous capabilities voluntarily or be legally required to do so; whether a frontier laboratory should ever need government permission before deploying an exceptionally capable model.
Ultimately, the question is whether Congress should ever be able to tell an AI company to stop—not forever, not because artificial intelligence is evil, and not because technological progress should end, but because human beings may occasionally need several months to understand what they have built before building something substantially more powerful. If the answer to that question is always no, then talk of “guardrails” means considerably less than it appears to mean. A guardrail that cannot prevent the vehicle from continuing forward under any circumstances is largely decorative.
No analogy between Sandy Hook and artificial intelligence should obscure the most important difference between them. Sandy Hook was already a tragedy. Twenty children and six adults were already dead before the political window opened. Nothing Congress did afterward could save them. AI safety presents us with the possibility—still, for the moment—of acting before an equivalent catalytic event.
Perhaps the catastrophic forecasts will prove wrong. Perhaps artificial general intelligence will arrive gradually. Perhaps alignment techniques will work. Perhaps the current generation of researchers is overestimating the risks of autonomy, cyber capabilities, biological design, or recursive improvement. That would be an excellent outcome. Good safety regulations sometimes look unnecessary in retrospect precisely because the catastrophe they were designed to prevent never occurs.
But American politics has a dangerous tendency to demand catastrophe as proof. After industrial accidents, we improve industrial safety. After financial crises, we strengthen financial regulation. After terrorist attacks, we close security vulnerabilities. After school shootings, we briefly debate gun laws, and then the urgency begins to dissipate. The extraordinary thing about the current AI moment is that some of the people closest to the technology are attempting to reverse that sequence. They are effectively asking whether society can argue about the regulations before discovering, through disaster, why those regulations were necessary.
Trump and Johnson are not wrong to worry about China. They are not wrong to worry about governmental overreach, incompetent regulation, or rules that inadvertently entrench today’s AI giants. But those objections need to become components of an AI-safety policy rather than substitutes for one. A serious response to the China problem might involve treaties, verification regimes, compute monitoring, narrowly targeted capability thresholds, and agreements between rival laboratories. A serious response to regulatory capture might involve independent oversight and protections for smaller competitors. These are difficult problems, but difficulty is not an argument for doing nothing.
There is another lesson buried in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. A country can recognize a danger. Its citizens can demand action. Experts can propose solutions. Politicians can express sympathy. Majorities can support reform. Everyone can insist that something must be done. And then, slowly and almost imperceptibly, the moment can pass.
That may be what is beginning to happen with artificial intelligence. The laboratories are asking for time. Researchers are asking for safeguards. Some political leaders are asking for binding action. Meanwhile, the president and the speaker of the House are signaling that America cannot afford to take its foot too far off the accelerator. Perhaps they will prove correct. Perhaps history will look back on the current safety fears as exaggerated.
But before accepting that gamble, we should remember how often American politics has followed the same sequence: a warning, a moment of clarity, a burst of political possibility, a thousand plausible reasons to wait, and eventually a tragedy that causes everyone to ask why nobody acted when there was still time.
After Sandy Hook, the tragedy came first and the opportunity for prevention came too late for twenty children and six educators. With artificial intelligence, for now at least, we have been given the order in reverse.
We should be very careful about throwing that advantage away.
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