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.

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About Thom

by 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 turne