The Center Is Not HoldingThe institutionalists are all but extinct. The moderates are fleeing. And Trumpism marches on.
Who’s ready for a Big, Beautiful Barrage of votes in the Senate? The upper chamber will be slogging away at Trump’s massive bill all day, with the president continuing to whip lawmakers to have something—anything, as long as it’s something!—on his desk to sign by July 4. Happy Monday.
Yeats, Where Art Thou?by William Kristol In case there was any doubt, it appears Yeats was prescient: “The centre cannot hold.” But maybe the great poet wasn’t entirely right. Is the problem, after all, that some mysterious “center” cannot hold? Or is that centrists are choosing not to hold on under pressure? That they’re choosing not to hold out against attacks? That they’re choosing not to fight back against the assault? Perhaps Charles Krauthammer—not a poet, but a deep and discerning student of politics—was closer to the truth: “Decline is a choice.” In other words: The center cannot hold if centrists won’t fight to hold it. And the centrists aren’t fighting. On Friday, Rep. Don Bacon, one of a few non-MAGA Republicans in the House, a supportive voice for Ukraine, announced he was retiring. And on Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis, one of two Senate Republicans who voted against cloture on the budget reconciliation bill, also announced that he won’t be running for re-election. But, in truth, their legacies are, to say the least, problematic. Except in the case of Ukraine, has Bacon ever cast an important vote against Trump? Tillis, of course, voted for Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he voted against convicting Trump after January 6th. It seems harsh to say, but it’s true: Decline has been the choice of these two decent men as well. And it’s been a choice for the Supreme Court of the United States, which under the leadership of another decent man, Chief Justice John Roberts, closed out its term by making it easier for the Trump administration to deport people to third countries where they might be tortured or killed, and by making it harder for district court judges to interfere in the Trump administration’s unconstitutional and illegal activities. Officials like Bacon and Tillis and Roberts think of themselves as institutionalists. They would say that they care about the institutions, about the system as a whole, as opposed to partisans who fight only for their preferred part of the society or for their preferred political party. A healthy society needs institutionalists. Such individuals can do a lot in ordinary times to support the institutions we need in the midst of turmoil from all sides. They can help see to it—to paraphrase Yeats—that things don’t fall apart and that mere anarchy isn’t set loose upon the world. But that’s in normal times. When our institutions are under fierce and sustained assault, the institutions need more than the affection and respect of the institutionalists. When the wreckers attack, the institutions need actual defenders. They need defenders who will fight back. They need defenders who might even launch counter-offensives. In normal times, those who hold the center and defend the institutions are the “establishment.” But in these abnormal times, much of our establishment has proven unwilling to defend, or incapable of defending, what had been built up by the impressive and hard work of their predecessors. The norms and institutions are crumbling under the blows of the wreckers who control the executive branch of the federal government. The Republican Congress isn’t standing in the way. The Supreme Court isn’t sticking its neck out to stop it. The barbarians are inside the gates. They have made great progress—more than even many of us alarmists expected—in the eight months since Trump’s re-election on November 5, 2024. Mass deportations are well underway. We’re getting used to having federal troops deployed in our cities. We have settled into a Department of Justice that is totally politicized. The assault on the universities is notching up victories. There’s not even a pretense any more that presidential corruption and grift are going to be in any way checked. And the wreckers have at least three-and-a-half more years in which they’ll continue to carry out their destructive projects. The centrists, the institutionalists, the establishment, are worthy types. They’re sheltered in the house their forebears built, peering anxiously out the windows and over the horizon, worrying about what might be happening out there. But—to return one last time to Yeats—the rough beast isn’t out there, slouching somewhere to be born. The rough beast is alive and well. And it’s right here. About Thomby Andrew Egger For years, Sen. Thom Tillis quietly chafed at the bootlicking humiliations demanded of the modern Republican lawmaker. And then he went out publicly and endured them. Tillis is one of the guys D.C. insiders have in mind when they talk of Republicans who speak about Trump one way in public, another way in private. But he clearly struggled with this more than most. From time to time, like an addict swearing he’s finally making a change, Tillis took the occasional stab at independence from Trump—but repeatedly lost his nerve at the last second. Back in 2019, when Trump, tired of trying to browbeat Congress into funding his border wall, announced he’d simply build it without permission, Tillis swore to oppose the action, arguing in a Washington Post op-ed that “there is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there’s an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach—that it’s acceptable for my party but not thy party.” But when Trump turned the screws on him and rumors about a primary challenger started swirling, Tillis backed off. Two weeks after he said he couldn’t support Trump’s emergency declaration, he did just that. In early 2021, as Trump worked feverishly to try to overturn Joe Biden’s election win, Tillis refused to support his fake-elector schemes. But he also took the coward’s way out at Trump’s impeachment trial, going along with Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wet-cardboard legal theory that it is improper to impeach former presidents. Tillis argued, inanely, that the impeachment power should not be turned “into a political weapon.” Earlier this year, as the Senate considered Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense, Tillis urged Danielle Hegseth to come forward to testify about her former brother-in-law’s troubling relationship with alcohol. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Tillis told her her testimony could be enough to tip the scales and defeat Hegseth’s nomination. She came forward. And then Tillis voted to confirm Hegseth anyway, providing the crucial 50th vote to get him over the top. Now, it seems, Tillis has finally made his break. The events came in remarkably rapid succession. Tillis said Saturday that he could not in good conscience support the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Trump immediately went on a Truth Social tirade, lobbing insult after insult at Tillis and saying he’d begin vetting primary challengers within weeks. One day later, Tillis told him not to bother—he wouldn’t be running for reelection. After the news broke, Tillis started behaving like a man from whom a great weight has been lifted. “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability,” the senator said in his retirement announcement. He’s even taking the opportunity to settle some old scores, like Trump’s endorsement of heroically disastrous candidate Mark Robinson in last year’s North Carolina governor’s race. “Thanks for the retirement wishes, Mr. President,” Tillis tweeted. “Looking forward to working with you for a successful 2026. Word to the wise, let’s avoid minisoldr.”¹ All this is no doubt psychologically satisfying for Tillis. He may even have opportunities to work with other GOP outcasts like Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to blunt the worst of the president’s legislative agenda in the months ahead. In the end, though, it will come to the same thing: Another conflicted Trump enabler out of office, to be replaced by either a more pliable MAGA cheerleader or a Democrat. Either way, the GOP will be left that much more diminished and compliant. Whatever good that comes from his liberation will last roughly 18 months. I’ve written before about the conservative movement’s embrace of Donald Trump as a lengthy personal education in vice. But when it comes to the passivity and slavishness of congressional Republicans in particular, the process has been more like animal husbandry. Traits like executive-branch skepticism, independence, and fearlessness have been gradually but inexorably bred out of the herd. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsANOTHER ACADEMIC SCALPING: The Trump administration’s extortion efforts against higher education reached a new high Friday when University of Virginia President James Ryan said he would resign from his post. The announcement came amid a probe from the Justice Department of the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, during which the administration had threatened the school with the revocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding if Ryan did not step down. Virginia Democrats denounced the move, with Sen. Mark Warner yesterday calling it “the most outrageous action, I think, this crowd has taken on education.” “They are doing damage to our flagship university,” Warner said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “If they can do it here, they’ll do it elsewhere.” But most universities seem to be taking “they’ll do it elsewhere” not as a clarion call to stand together against Trump’s predations, but as a reminder to make sure they’re not the nail Trump chooses to hammer next. Two months ago, the American Association of Colleges and Universities made a splash with a public statement of dissent “against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Press coverage hailed the statement as a possible beachhead for future resistance. But the group hasn’t made noise since. In fact, that April 22 statement is, quite literally, the last the group has put out on its website. It’s only issued one additional press release since then, which was on student guidelines for the age of AI. WHAT’S WORSE THAN A CRISIS? Are we in a constitutional crisis? Are we about to be in one? Have we been in one all along? Over at Washington Monthly, Jake Rakove invites us to consider the awful possibility that “constitutional crisis” is no longer a useful descriptor for where we are today:
“Crisis” implies conflict: a titanic standoff between parts of our government. Instead, Congress and the courts have largely allowed themselves to be made irrelevant as the executive charges forward. Read the whole thing. OUT WITH THE PARLIAMENTARIAN: You had to know this was coming: Trump is now demanding Republicans overrule the Senate parliamentarian on the Big Beautiful Bill after she ruled that some of the items being squeezed through the reconciliation process ran afoul of the rules. Last Thursday, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) called for Senate Republicans to simply ignore the parliamentarian’s rulings, and on Sunday, Trump endorsed that plan of action: “Great Congressman Greg Steube is 100% correct,” he said. “An unelected Senate Staffer (Parliamentarian) should not be allowed to hurt the Republicans Bill.” To overrule the parliamentarian, of course, would spell the functional end of the Senate filibuster—a step Trump repeatedly warned Kamala Harris would take during last year’s campaign. But that was then. This is now. And consistency is for suckers. Cheap Shots
1 I don’t want to re-trigger anyone who’s managed to block the whole sordid saga from their mind, but I’ll just remind you that calling himself a “black Nazi” on a porn forum is somehow not the most viscerally off-putting thing Robinson did under his “minisoldr” online handle. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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The Center Is Not Holding
June 30, 2025
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