Here are two stories that will provide you with a very clear overview of what’s going on behind the scenes while we fixate on Trump’s bombast. “Not only do most Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Trump is handling his job, but an unprecedented majority now embraces ethnic diversity and racial equality, two essential pillars of multiracial democracy. Yet translating this new multiethnic majority into a governing majority has been difficult. Democracy is supposed to be a game of numbers: The party with the most votes wins. In our political system, however, the majority does not govern. Constitutional design and recent political geographic trends — where Democrats and Republicans live — have unintentionally conspired to produce what is effectively becoming minority rule.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in the NYT: End Minority Rule.

+ And the excellent Dahlia Lithwick: This Is What It Feels Like to Live Under Minority Rule. “Like Barrett’s appointment, the project of Donald Trump’s entire presidency is to remind you that you don’t have a say in your governance. And because you don’t have a say, you don’t need any actual information from which to decide. This is what we learned again last week in an interview with CBS’s Lesley Stahl in which Trump announced that he won’t disclose his new long-promised health care plan to protect Americans dying from a pandemic until after the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act. It doesn’t matter what his new plan is, anyway, he implies. The very definition of flooding the zone with shit is that nothing matters, because you have no choices left to make.”

+ And about that big health plan book that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany handed to Lesley Stahl after Trump stormed out of their interview … it didn’t contain any health plans. In this administration, the only disease more widespread than Covid is the lying.