Fun fact: Kalm was once nominated as a finalist for the West Plains Chamber of Commerce Businessman of the Year award. Feels like a lifetime ago
Well worth the read regardless of your ideology:
A MOUNTAIN OF DISTRACTIONS
The Long Game: Fifty Years to Capture the Courts, a Generation to Capture the Country
Forget the distractions for a moment. Forget the made-for-television outrage of the day, the latest presidential obscenity, the social-media eruption, the manufactured culture-war emergency, the shiny object being dangled in front of an exhausted American public. If you want to understand what I believe is happening to this country, stop staring at Donald Trump for five minutes and look backward. Look at the photograph accompanying this essay. Look at the political infrastructure that existed long before Trump descended that escalator. Trump did not invent this movement. He did not conceive its legal philosophy, build its judicial pipeline, finance its think tanks or spend decades cultivating the political conditions necessary for this moment. He inherited an extraordinary machine, discovered that almost none of the people around him were willing to tell him where its constitutional limits were, and proceeded to drive the fucking thing at full throttle. The authoritarian danger I have been writing about isn’t something I suddenly discovered in 2026. I have watched its architecture being assembled for years, and its roots stretch back roughly half a century.
That distinction matters because calling this simply “Trumpism” actually gives Trump too much credit. The modern conservative institutional project reaches back through the backlash against the social and political changes of the 1960s and 1970s, through the rise of an organized conservative legal movement, through the Reagan revolution, through the development of a vast network of advocacy organizations, donors, lawyers, strategists and think tanks, and eventually through Karl Rove’s era of extraordinarily disciplined partisan warfare. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 and grew from a conservative law-school organization into one of the most consequential networks in American legal life. Scholars studying judicial nominations have documented just how significant affiliation with that movement became, and Trump himself openly promised during his 2016 campaign that his conservative judges would be selected with the Federalist Society’s involvement. That history is important because what Americans are experiencing today didn’t materialize when Trump took the oath of office. Trump was the accelerant. The combustible material had been stacked around the republic for decades.
Karl Rove understood something about American politics that I believe Democrats repeatedly underestimated: political power is much more durable when you build institutions instead of merely winning elections. Rove became famous for pursuing durable Republican dominance, but the larger conservative movement was simultaneously pursuing something even more consequential, a durable legal infrastructure. Presidents serve four or eight years. Senators eventually leave. Congressional majorities change. Federal judges can remain for decades. Supreme Court justices can influence American life for a generation. If you spend enough years cultivating lawyers, developing constitutional theories, financing litigation, identifying judicial candidates and building the political machinery necessary to confirm them, eventually elections become only one battlefield in a much larger war over governmental power. The conservative legal movement began organizing around the Federalist Society in the early 1980s and, over the following decades, became deeply influential in Republican judicial selection.
That is why I refuse to become hypnotized by every new Trump circus. The circus matters, certainly. People get hurt beneath the spectacle. Policies have consequences. Wars have consequences. Immigration enforcement has consequences. Tariffs have consequences. Corruption has consequences. But distraction is itself politically useful. Give Americans twelve outrages before breakfast and eventually outrage becomes white noise. Exhaust people. Overwhelm them. Make yesterday’s unthinkable act disappear beneath today’s even more preposterous one. Keep everybody arguing about the orange clown under the spotlight while the electricians, carpenters and demolition crew continue working behind the curtain. Meanwhile executive authority expands, regulatory power contracts, voting rules are contested, precedents disappear and the composition of the federal judiciary changes for decades. As recently as today, Trump was positioned through another nomination to potentially create the first Trump-appointed majority on the Eighth Circuit, another reminder that judicial transformation is not ancient history; it is continuing right now.
And this is precisely why Brett Kavanaugh mattered. This is why Neil Gorsuch mattered. This is why Amy Coney Barrett mattered. These were never merely three names appearing in the news for several weeks during confirmation hearings. They were generational investments. During Trump’s first presidency, he appointed 231 federal judges, and a congressional record incorporating reporting on the conservative legal network noted that 86 percent of his circuit and Supreme Court appointees were current or former Federalist Society members. You don’t spend forty years developing a legal movement because you are interested only in tomorrow morning’s headlines. You do it because constitutional interpretation determines the boundaries within which every future political fight occurs.
That is also why I think Americans make a terrible mistake when they imagine that an authoritarian transformation must announce itself with soldiers occupying television stations and tanks parked outside Congress. Modern democratic erosion can be much quieter and considerably more sophisticated. It can occur through statutes, appointments, executive orders, administrative reinterpretations, litigation and judicial decisions. Every individual action arrives accompanied by lawyers explaining why it is perfectly legal. Every expansion of power is described as temporary, necessary or historically justified. Every discarded norm is treated as an isolated event. And because each step occurs through recognizable institutions, citizens reassure themselves that democracy must still be functioning because the buildings remain standing. The marble columns are still there. The flags are still flying. Congress is still meeting. Judges are still wearing robes. Elections are still scheduled. The dangerous question isn’t whether those institutions continue to exist. It is whether they continue performing the democratic functions for which they were created.
Trump was perfectly suited to exploit this environment because he possesses something the architects of the older conservative movement generally did not: an almost complete indifference to institutional restraint. He didn’t have to understand fifty years of conservative legal theory. Other people had already done the homework. He needed only to understand power. During the 2016 campaign he offered conservatives something extraordinarily valuable: judicial appointments they could trust. In return, millions of voters who were uncertain about Trump could reassure themselves that whatever they thought of the man, the courts would move decisively rightward. It worked. His three Supreme Court appointments fundamentally altered the Court, while his hundreds of lower-court appointments reshaped the federal judiciary beneath.
There is an important complication here because history refuses to remain conveniently simple: Trump has since publicly broken with portions of the old Federalist Society establishment, attacking Leonard Leo and complaining about judges who failed to demonstrate the personal loyalty Trump expected. That doesn’t disprove the larger point. In some ways it makes the current moment more disturbing. The institutional conservative movement spent decades building a judiciary designed to advance conservative legal principles; Trump increasingly demands something different, personal loyalty and maximum presidential authority. Those two projects overlap substantially in some areas and collide spectacularly in others. The danger, in my view, lies precisely in that convergence: a decades-old infrastructure for shifting governmental power meeting a president whose conception of executive authority appears constrained less by conservative constitutional theory than by whether anyone can successfully tell him no.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential-immunity decision was therefore not some obscure legal disagreement that ordinary Americans could safely ignore. The Court held that presidents possess absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within their exclusive constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts. Whatever one’s legal interpretation of that decision, it dramatically changed the landscape surrounding presidential criminal accountability. And it arrived during a broader period in which the Court has repeatedly confronted fundamental questions involving presidential power, federal agencies and the limits of executive authority. Even sympathetic accounts of Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledge the tension between his concern for institutional legitimacy and a jurisprudence that has often favored stronger presidential authority and conservative legal objectives.
This is where my concern extends far beyond Trump himself. Donald Trump will eventually leave the stage because every human being does. The infrastructure remains. Judicial precedents remain. Institutional powers remain. Legal doctrines remain. The next president inherits whatever authority the previous president accumulated. That is why constitutional guardrails matter regardless of which political party occupies the White House. If I wouldn’t want a president I despise possessing a particular power, I shouldn’t enthusiastically hand that power to a president I happen to like. That was supposed to be one of the foundational insights of the American experiment: government should be designed around the possibility that imperfect, ambitious and occasionally dangerous human beings will occupy positions of enormous authority.
The larger conservative project also cannot honestly be reduced to one issue like abortion, however consequential abortion rights have been. For decades, conservative lawyers and organizations have contested the constitutional and statutory boundaries governing regulatory agencies, organized labor, environmental regulation, corporate authority, voting law, gun rights, religious liberty and executive power. Critics describe this as court capture; conservatives describe it as restoring original constitutional principles after decades of liberal judicial activism. Both descriptions acknowledge the underlying reality that the courts became a central battlefield in American politics. A congressional hearing on judicial independence documented testimony describing the Federalist Society’s enormous influence over Republican judicial selection, while academic research likewise demonstrates how deeply Federalist Society affiliation became intertwined with confirmation politics.
And Democrats, frankly, spent far too many years behaving as though winning the presidency was the entire fucking game. It wasn’t. State legislatures mattered. Secretaries of state mattered. Attorneys general mattered. Senate confirmation machinery mattered. Redistricting mattered. Lower federal courts mattered enormously. School boards mattered. The people methodically building conservative political infrastructure understood that power is accumulated from the courthouse to the statehouse to Washington. While liberals frequently organized around presidential personalities and election cycles, conservatives spent decades building institutions capable of surviving electoral defeat. You don’t have to admire the objectives to recognize the organizational discipline. As much as I hate to say it, Republicans have been playing chess, while democrats have been playing checkers. The checkmate on the horizon.
This is also why lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court deserve serious reconsideration. Life tenure was intended to protect judicial independence, but in a modern political environment where justices may serve thirty or forty years, every vacancy becomes an apocalyptic partisan battle precisely because so much generational power rides upon it. An eighteen-year staggered term system has been proposed by scholars and reform advocates as one way of preserving substantial judicial independence while reducing the lottery-like consequences of death and retirement. Whatever reform ultimately proves constitutionally and politically achievable, pretending the present arrangement is immune from reconsideration simply because it is familiar strikes me as intellectual laziness. A democracy should be capable of examining its institutions without being accused of destroying them.
And this is where the mountain of distractions becomes so dangerous. Trump understands television. He understands spectacle. He understands that an outrageous statement can consume an entire news cycle. He understands that if everybody is screaming about the latest insult, stunt, feud or obscenity, far fewer people are reading judicial opinions, following administrative changes, watching confirmation hearings or asking what obscure alteration to federal authority will mean ten years from now. Whether every distraction is deliberately choreographed is almost beside the point. The effect is the same: an overwhelmed, exhausted population struggles to distinguish between political entertainment and structural transformation.
I have been accused occasionally of suddenly discovering authoritarianism because I write about it with greater urgency now. Nothing could be further from the truth. I knew where this road could lead because the road has been visible for decades. I watched the evolution of Republican strategy through Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Rove and the modern conservative legal movement. I watched the increasing ideological sorting of American politics. I watched compromise become betrayal, opponents become enemies and elections become existential warfare. I watched institutions that depended upon unwritten norms discover that unwritten norms aren’t worth much when people in power simply decide not to honor them. Trump didn’t create those vulnerabilities. He discovered how little resistance many of them actually offered.
What makes this moment different is that the theoretical danger has become practical. We are no longer debating what an American president might attempt if surrounded by people willing to test the outer boundaries of executive authority. We are watching those boundaries tested. We are no longer wondering what would happen after decades of organized judicial politics. We are living with the resulting judiciary. We are no longer speculating about what happens when Americans become so politically exhausted that another extraordinary event barely survives twenty-four hours in the national consciousness. We are watching that exhaustion happen in real time.
History is filled with republics whose citizens believed they had more time. Another election. Another court case. Another institution that surely would intervene. Another responsible adult somewhere behind the curtain. Democratic systems rarely disappear in one cinematic explosion. More often they are hollowed out incrementally while daily life continues. People go to work. Children go to school. Baseball games are played. Musicians play shows. Television networks sell advertising. The institutions retain their familiar names even as their purposes change. By the time enough people recognize what has happened, restoring what was lost can be infinitely more difficult than defending it would have been.
That is why November 3, 2026, matters so much to me. Not because one election magically repairs fifty years of institutional warfare, and certainly not because one political party possesses some mystical monopoly on virtue. It matters because elections remain the most direct instrument ordinary Americans possess for determining who exercises governmental power. Voting is not sufficient by itself. Neither is marching, writing, protesting, organizing, litigating or speaking. Democracy requires all of it, repeatedly, because democracy isn’t something previous generations finished building and handed to us shrink-wrapped. It survives only as long as citizens insist upon maintaining it.
“We the People” was never intended as decorative language. The Constitution does not begin “We the Presidents,” “We the Supreme Court,” “We the Billionaires,” “We the Corporations,” or “We the Political Parties.” The ultimate legitimacy of this experiment rests with the governed. That means the antidote to authoritarianism isn’t despair. It is participation, vigilance, institutional reform, accountability and the stubborn refusal of ordinary people to surrender their citizenship to somebody promising that he alone can fix everything.
So when somebody asks me whether I’m only now realizing what is happening, my answer is emphatically no. I’ve been watching this Mount Everest being built for years. Trump is simply standing on top of it waving his arms, covered in gold, making so much fucking noise that millions of Americans are staring at him instead of examining what lies beneath his feet.
Forget the circus for a moment.
Look at the architecture.
Look at the courts.
Look at the accumulation of executive power.
Look at the organizations, the money, the legal theories, the judicial pipeline and the decades of preparation.
Then look at that photograph again.
The warning isn’t that something might someday begin.
The warning is that it began a long time ago.
And we are living in the payoff.
