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**SEPTEMBER 2, 2025**

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I started to write a story about Congress’s workload after returning from the August recess, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized how ridiculous it was to focus on a useless appendage to an autocracy. I wrote this instead [link removed], in the hopes that Democrats will realize how irrelevant they have been made, and how they need to do something about it.

**–David Dayen, executive editor**

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MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/AP PHOTO

There’s No More Business as Usual in Washington [link removed]

I have been writing these “back to school” stories about Congress coming off its August recess for years now. They catch people up on what the legislative branch’s top priorities are, and there’s always a laundry list of things to attend to. And I guess I could go through the motions and give you that information again.

I could say that government funding runs out at the end of the month and the two parties are nowhere near a resolution. I could talk about the looming health insurance price spike [link removed] and whether Republicans will extend Affordable Care Act subsidies [link removed]. I could talk about the expectation that Senate Republicans will change the rules [link removed] to speed up confirmation of judges and administration appointees, even as some Republicans try to put up their own roadblocks [link removed] on certain nominees. I could talk about Donald Trump’s crime bill [link removed] that Republicans are sure to try to fast-track, and the House-Senate friction [link removed] on doing another partisan mega-bill [link removed]. I could even get into the weeds and talk about the defense authorization bill [link removed] and a long-awaited bipartisan crackdown on pharmacy benefit managers [link removed] and a House Republican bill [link removed] trying to regulate college athletics.

But at this point, I think it would be a fruitless endeavor to operate as if the U.S. Congress is a primary or even peripheral engine for making policy in this country. I don’t want to bestow a cutesy nickname to trivialize the situation, but we just got through four weeks of, for lack of a better phrase, Authoritarian August. Federal troops are in one American city (albeit engaged in sanitation duty) and will soon be in others [link removed]; federal agencies are being dismantled [link removed] at the whim of the powerful [link removed]; federal paramilitaries continue to kidnap people off the street [link removed], often people here legally, and disappear them into the carceral state; people who have criticized the president are being targeted for arrest or harassment or worse [link removed]; a compliant Supreme Court blesses illegal administration activities [link removed] on a routine basis; the firing of a railroad regulator [link removed] for the offense of being a Democrat in the midst of a review of the largest consolidation of freight rail in U.S. history is a mere footnote amid the chaos.

Essays about precisely where we are on the road to fascism [link removed] or authoritarianism [link removed] or “competitive authoritarianism [link removed]” are proliferating, and hard to refute. But the one that stuck with me came from Jonathan Bernstein [link removed], illustrating the real dichotomy at work in America today. Usually, a despot grows unpopular after years in power, but in this case, Trump is

**already** unpopular amid his ascent to power. His latest approval numbers are at 37 percent [link removed], a low for this term; even the good numbers [link removed] show him to be unpopular.

How can such an unlikable figure be so intimidating? How can the Wizard of Oz inspire obedience

**after** the curtain has been pulled back, revealing his diminutive stature? As Bernstein explains, everybody with the ability to stop Trump is simply sleepwalking.

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