When the Story Stops Working
Trump's presidency runs on belief, and belief depends on keeping its contradictions apart. That distance is closing.
- Trump-era governance
- Democratic norms
- Civics unhinged
Trump's presidency runs on belief, and belief depends on keeping its contradictions apart. That distance is closing.
Prices rise, confidence slips, allies hedge. None of it is ideological—it's mechanical, and mechanics always assert themselves.
What JD Vance Reveals About Who Governs Now
A failed argument can be tried again. A disqualifying one cannot. How the Big Lie ran out of room.
In a system where contradiction is no longer a liability, coherence ceases to be a requirement. What follows is not chaos, but a form of control that no longer needs to make sense to function.
How Trump's Governing Model Produces Cotradictions at Home and Abroad
What You Still Get When Democrats Govern — And What Trump Keeps Burning Down
As Americans increasingly view their political opponents as morally “bad,” the old warning about the Ugly American begins to feel less like a stereotype and more like a civic diagnosis.
The United States is escalating a conflict it cannot fully describe, at a cost it has not fully explained, against a threat it has not clearly defined.
Trump told his own party economic relief would wait until they delivered his election-law demands. That isn't coalition governance—it's leverage.
Civics Unhinged is the new home for my long-form satire and political commentary — a place where essays can breathe without algorithms or paywalls. I write about the civic unraveling of our time: the absurdities of power, the decay of seriousness, and the endurance of humor as a last civic virtue. Dunnegin is a former senior federal official, policy analyst, and longtime political consultant who has advised members of Congress, federal agency heads, and corporate leaders. He has spent decades...
Heritage, Myth, and the Power We Inherit
How impulse displaced architecture in American statecraft [This essay is Part 1 of a two-part series on Trump’s foreign policy method and its global consequences. Part 2, Coercion Without Credibility Publishes March 3.]
Somewhere between the ruins of Enlightenment optimism and the latest GOP fundraiser, History called it quits.
Why Judicial Power Now Turns on Compliance, Not Rulings
A chronicle of American absurdity, written with a straight face and a sharp pen. Civics Unhinged — satire for those who still give a damn.
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