Signs of resistance
Developments
- For the first time, the U.S. administration has lost in court, lost votes in its own party, and lost its nerve in the face of mass protests—all in one week.
- In Iran, a revolutionary who stormed the American embassy is arrested 47 years later by his revolution’s keepers. In Turkey, a justice minister takes his oath through a wall of fists. And in Belize, the tomb of a king hidden for almost 1,700 years.
Features
- Why is betting everywhere now? Gerda Reith on how it became so mixed up in sports—and then everything else.
- How did the open web go into such “rapid decline”? Michael Socolow on why search engines have gotten worse, old links no longer work, and the internet is increasingly siloed.
Books
- How fascist is India’s Hindutva movement? Luna Sebastian’s Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva.
Music
- What are cantigas?
- & New tracks from Nilza Costa, Geologist, Courtesy x Erika de Casier, The Soft Pink Truth, & Alexis Taylor x Lola Kirke.
+ Weather report
- A year of rain in three weeks—and strange winter heat from Tehran to Cairo …
Developments
Every action
Anxieties about U.S. President Donald Trump’s autocratic tendencies are almost as old as his political career—and at every stage, he’s done his level best to justify them. He banned travelers from Muslim-majority countries in the first week of his first term, later trying to extort Ukraine for dirt on his political opponents and ultimately inciting the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The idea that all of this represented “fascism” took hold early. It was never entirely on-target. And its imprecision has played into Trump’s hands. But the autocratic patterns are hard to dismiss.
As is the conclusion that his second term has been worse. Trump has fired inspectors general across the federal government and purged career officials who resisted his agenda. His Justice Department has opened criminal investigations into political opponents and into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The administration deployed 3,000 armed immigration agents into Minneapolis–Saint Paul, where federal officers shot and killed two American civilians. Abroad, the administration has used emergency powers to impose tariffs that multiple courts struck down, extracted a foreign head of state by military force, and threatened a NATO ally with annexation. And while his approval, per Pew Research Center, has fallen to 37 percent, his consolidation of executive power—at home and abroad—has not slowed.
And yet. On Wednesday, six House Republicans voted to overturn Trump’s tariffs on Canada—the first congressional rebuke of his signature economic policy. In North Carolina, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, blocked the president’s Federal Reserve nominee, calling the independence of the central bank “non-negotiable.” The administration pulled agents out of Minnesota after weeks of mass protest, the fatal shootings of two civilians, and a general strike in sub-zero temperatures. And the Epstein files—which Trump lobbied aggressively to suppress—have generated a fury that’s exposed him to pressure from his own side as much as from anywhere.
What do all these points of resistance add up to?
- The courtroom and the shadow docket. In Trump’s second term, federal judges have pushed back harder than any other institution—with more than 600 legal challenges to the administration, per the Just Security tracker, with plaintiffs winning nearly twice as often as the government. But the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority keeps overruling lower courts, siding with the administration in nearly every emergency appeal—often with little explanation. One pending case—in which lower courts found Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs unlawful—could break that pattern. The Supreme Court could rule any day.
- Permission to defect. The House tariff vote and the Epstein Files Transparency Act look like genuine rebukes. But of the six Republican tariff rebels, two are retiring; a third faces a Trump-backed challenger. Tillis, whose blockade of Trump’s Federal Reserve nominee may be the most consequential act of congressional resistance this term, is also retiring. Republican defiance tracks inversely with electoral exposure. That’s defiance with an expiration date—it leaves when they do.
- Sub-zero. Operation Metro Surge—the deployment of 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis–Saint Paul—became the most dramatic domestic confrontation of the Trump presidency. Two civilians died at agents’ hands. Tens of thousands marched in temperatures that hit 23 below zero. The state and the Twin Cities sued. The administration withdrew agents and signaled the operation’s end—but then opened criminal investigations into Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey.
- Conscience, individually priced. Federal prosecutors resigned over the fatal shooting of Renée Good, a U.S. citizen, by an immigration agent in Minneapolis, and the Epstein files. The Department of Justice fired an attorney for admitting in court that the government had wrongfully deported someone. Powell accused the DoJ of political intimidation on camera. These aren’t coordinated acts; they’re moments where individual obligations collided with political pressure and didn’t give. Political standards haven’t disappeared. They just cost more than they used to.
- The numbers game. Trump’s net approval has dropped 14 points since March 2025. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, it’s collapsed from +9 to –42 in a year. Independents have moved 24 points against him. But Trump governed through low approval for four years in his first term. The question here is whether these numbers give Republican legislators permission to break ranks—or whether the president’s hold on the primary electorate keeps them frozen. So far, the answer depends on whether the legislator in question plans to run again.
Each of these points of friction is real. But each is also conditional. Courts rule—and the Supreme Court overrules. Congress defects—but only with members who aren’t running again. A city forced a retreat—then the administration retaliated against its leaders. The global context is just as ambiguous: In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán built the model—capturing courts, co-opting media, rewriting electoral rules—and for over a decade, no challenge stuck. Now he faces his first credible opponent, and the European Union is withholding €19 billion over rule-of-law concerns. Still, authoritarian populism has gained ground across Central Europe over the past year, and the hard right has advanced in Portugal, Austria, and France.
Trump’s power is conditional too, though. He’s governing at 37 percent approval with a party whose loyalty runs through primary voters—people who tend not to show up in midterm elections, which are coming in nine months. His grip on power is formidable. Whether it’s durable is another question—and one authoritarian populists from Budapest to Brasília have discovered, sometimes suddenly, can break either way.
The question is going to be whether these elements of resistance to the Trump administration remain isolated—or start compounding. They didn’t for Orbán, for more than a decade. Until they did.
Meanwhile
- The system’s own. Last weekend, after weeks of protests and a crackdown that killed thousands, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested four senior members of the Reformists Front—including its leader, Azar Mansouri, and Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, who led the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy—over a statement calling on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to resign. The Reformists Front opposed the street protests; it tried to change the system from within. Three days later—on the revolution’s 47th anniversary—President Masoud Pezeshkian told the country he is “ashamed before the people.” No senior official in the Islamic Republic’s history has said anything like it. Still unclear: whether this is a regime managing two audiences or one losing coherence. … See “The loyal opposition in Tehran.”
- Rewarded in full. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed Akın Gürlek—the Istanbul prosecutor who jailed Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and indicted him on 142 charges—as the country’s justice minister. Opposition lawmakers rushed the podium to block the swearing-in; ruling-party members formed a wall while Gürlek read the oath through the shouts and punches. İmamoğlu’s first hearing—402 defendants—is scheduled for March 9. As justice minister, Gürlek now chairs the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which controls every appointment and disciplinary action in Turkey’s judiciary. … See “A prosecutor’s new brief.”
- Seventeen centuries underground. After 40 years of excavation at the Maya city of Caracol in Belize, archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase discovered the tomb of Te’ Kab Chaak, founder of the kingdom’s ruling dynasty, who ascended to the throne in A.D. 331. The team first dug in the area in 1993; when they returned last year, they detected a void just below where the earlier excavation had stopped. It opened into a seven-foot burial chamber, its walls covered in red cinnabar, with jadeite jewelry, carved bone tubes, and a jade-and-shell mosaic death mask. It’s one of the only cases in Maya archaeology where remains can be matched to a named figure from hieroglyphic inscriptions.
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Features
Empress of luck
Why is betting everywhere now? Gerda Reith on how it became so mixed up in sports—and then everything else.
