By By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
1. Hope
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that will likely be remembered as one of the key legal moments of President Trump’s second administration. By finding his tariff policies largely unconstitutional, the Court has—for once—placed a limit on a style of executive power that has long seemed to treat law as an inconvenience rather than a constraint. And that, we should always remember, was a stance backed up by the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, on July 1, 2024. A right-wing 6-3 majority held that presidents hold broad criminal immunity for acts committed under presidential authority, even if those acts would be otherwise illegal under U.S. statutes.
But now, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch—both Trump appointees—as well as Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the liberal judges to insist on limitations to presidential power. Whatever one thinks of the technical reasoning of the opinion, its political meaning is hard to miss: this is a much‑needed victory for the rule of law and for the separation of powers in the United States.
The president’s reaction came quickly. Donald Trump expressed that he was “ashamed of certain members of the Court, absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.” Coney Barrett’s and Gorsuch’s verdicts on the matter Trump referred to as an “embarrassment to their families.” (His response at the State of the Union Address on February 24 was a bit milder: he referred to the ruling as “disappointing” and “unfortunate.”)
Nor could Vice President JD Vance let the moment pass without comment. In a brief but revealing statement, he charged that “today, the Supreme Court decided that Congress, despite giving the president the ability to ‘regulate imports,’ didn’t actually mean it. This is lawlessness from the Court, plain and simple.” Lawlessness from the Court: in a single phrase, Vance managed to invert the situation entirely.
For some time now, the Supreme Court has, in decision after decision, tended to favor President Trump’s priorities and to expand the discretionary leeway of the executive. Now that, for once, the Court has drawn a line and restored some measure of constitutional balance, Vance brands that assertion of judicial independence as “lawlessness.”
To label such a check ‘lawless’ is to suggest that any limit on presidential discretion is by definition illegitimate—a view that, if taken seriously, would abolish the very idea of constitutional government.
There was something not just comical but actually farcical about Vance’s comment—“farcical” as in a famous line from a piece by Karl Marx that others too have realized is useful to understand the current political situation in the United States. (See here and here.) And that we can understand Vance’s comment as farcical in that sense is a sign of hope for the cause of democracy in the United States. The purpose of this commentary is to develop and elaborate on this perception.
Let me be clear: this is about hope. I have also recently written about the possible end of universalism, a government driven by civilizational panic, the moral failure of the Trump presidency, the disorienting nature of our times, and the development of vindictive tolerance and the Intimidating State, among many other topics.
Still, the situation is not hopeless—and that is also worth saying.
2. Vance’s Gaslighting: the Tragic Version
I have written before about Vance’s talent for this kind of inversion. In February 2025, at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), he displayed an extraordinary talent for gaslighting his audience. There, in a room full of European leaders and security experts gathered under the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine, he elected not to speak about Ukraine at all. Instead, he indicted Europe itself for democratic backsliding and for violations of freedom of expression.
In that earlier essay I offered a working definition of gaslighting: “X gaslights Y in the presence of Z if X tries to persuade Y and Z that Y violates certain values or commitments that X, Y, and Z all are taken to endorse, whereas in fact it is X that violates them.” (I have since elaborated on gaslighting more systematically.)
Vance’s performance at the 2025 MSC was a near‑perfect specimen. He accused European democracies of insufficient commitment to democracy and rights precisely when those democracies were struggling to defend themselves—and Ukraine—against a brutal authoritarian assault. He labeled as “Soviet‑era words” such concepts as misinformation and disinformation, as if European efforts to safeguard the integrity of elections and the dignity of vulnerable minorities were in spirit no different from the censorship regimes of totalitarian states. Under the guise of concern for freedom, he belittled the very guardrails that Europeans, for good historical reasons, regard as essential to democracy’s survival.
He also did so precisely when his own government was putting ever more pressure on democracy and rights.
Vance’s words were not just another episode in domestic partisan theater. They were uttered in Munich, a place heavy with the memory of past appeasement. When he described attempts to regulate digital platforms and constrain disinformation as the work of “old, entrenched interests,” he was not simply mischaracterizing a policy debate. He was actively undermining democratic resilience at a moment when authoritarianism, as Belarusian activist Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya would say at that same conference, “spreads like cancer” until “people like you”—meaning all of us—are no longer able to stop it.
The stakes of this gaslighting were enormous. In a speech given just days earlier in Paris, Vance gave cover to a fusion, already underway, between a Trump‑led government and a club of tech billionaires eager to treat regulation as elitist suppression of “alternative viewpoints,” even as they built unprecedented infrastructures for surveillance, manipulation, and profit. He mocked European concerns about AI safety as narrow and paternalistic, insisting that only “opportunity,” not “safety,” mattered—a neat rhetorical way of discrediting the very notion that powerful new technologies should be constrained by commitments to democracy and human rights.
This was gaslighting with world‑historical implications. It shaped how the world would talk about disinformation, about the responsibilities of digital platforms, and about the boundary between legitimate democratic speech and the kind of speech that corrodes the very conditions of self‑government. (Also see my commentary on American AI policy, a policy already anticipated in Vance’s Paris speech.)
In that sense Vance’s gaslighting belonged, to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to the “tragic” register of political drama. This text is among Marx’s better‑known pieces of political analysis. It has that title because Marx deliberately linked Louis Bonaparte’s 1851 coup to Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous 1799 coup of 18 Brumaire (in the French Revolutionary calendar), which corresponds to November 9. On that date, Napoleon Bonaparte (Louis‑Napoleon’s uncle) carried out a coup d’état that made him First Consul—the key step toward his later rule as Emperor.
Louis‑Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president in 1848 under the Second Republic. It was on December 2, 1851, that he staged his own coup, dissolved the Assembly, and later declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Marx chose that title because he meant to say that Louis was trying to replay his uncle’s 18 Brumaire—another Bonapartist coup that turns a republic into a personal dictatorship.
The Eighteenth Brumaire is especially famous for stating that “all great world‑historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice (…): the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The original 18 Brumaire (1799) is the “tragic event,” an event with real historical depth (Napoleon I reshaping France and Europe). Napoleon’s act was world‑historically serious and necessary—as well as ruinous at the same time. It is grandeur mixed with catastrophe. Louis’s 1851 coup is a second‑rate imitation, the “farce” that copies the form without the same historical substance.
Vance’s gaslighting in Munich was by no means tragic at this scale. But given the location at which he gave this speech and the early stage of his exposure to global politics as American vice president, his obliviousness and, in fact, callousness to the world’s real problems made his speech tragic in the sense in which Marx uses this word. And that was profoundly bad news for the world.
Vance’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling of February 20, 2026 was farcical also in the sense in which Marx uses the term. I will need to elaborate a bit more on Marx’s text, but the sense in which Vance’s reaction was farcical now is good news to the world. There is light at the end of what still seems like a very long tunnel. There is hope.
3. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—and Trump’s America
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte analyzes how Louis‑Napoleon (Napoleon III) could seize power and what that reveals about class conflict and the state. The heroic, tragic upheaval of 1789–1815 (the French Revolution and Napoleon I) returns, in 1848–1851, as a shabbier replay: the nephew imitating the uncle, staging a coup, using plebiscites, invoking “the people” while hollowing out republican institutions.
After 1848, as Marx explains, no class can rule securely through parliament. The big bourgeoisie wants order and property protection but fears the democratic empowerment of workers. The petty bourgeoisie is too weak and vacillating. Peasants are numerous but scattered, susceptible to myth and nostalgia. The working class shows revolutionary potential but is repressed. In that stalemate, the state apparatus—army, bureaucracy, police—gains relative autonomy.
Farce, in Marx’s sense, is not just comedy; it is repetition without substance, gesture without genuine transformative power—even when it still does harm.
A Bonapartist figure can appear “above classes,” claiming to represent the whole nation while actually stabilizing property relations and suppressing democratic energies. Politics turns into costume drama: actors borrow the language and symbols of past revolutions to mask new, less heroic interests.
As intellectual historian Peter Gordon has reminded us in his reflection on Marx and Trump, tragedy in this context is not mere sadness; it is the spectacle of democracy undermining itself, of universal suffrage and liberal norms being used to destroy the very framework that once gave them meaning. Watching the coup of 1851, Marx came to see that democratic procedures alone provide no guarantee of progress. They can just as easily deliver the “volunteer of providence” who insists that only he can save the nation and that any resistance to his will is by definition illegitimate.
Gordon suggests that Marx’s famous maxim that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce” needs revision in the case of Trump. Trump’s first term (2016–2020) was already a farce, a spectacle of bluster and incompetence that nonetheless left many institutions standing. His return to office in 2024 then points toward a tragedy from which we may well not recover. (For my own take on Trump’s understanding of the presidency, see here.)
The farcical has become the prelude to the tragic: a democracy that indulged a clown now finds itself ruled by a demagogue who has learned from his failures and is less constrained by courts and Congress. The sleep of reason, as Goya warned, produces monsters.
For gaslighting as a style of leadership to succeed, it requires particular environments. Gaslighting is a form of spectacle, and one kind of environment in which it can flourish is that of dysfunctional democratic politics. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire offers a paradigmatic analysis of how political outsiders capture power through theatrical performance rather than institutional competence—under circumstances when institutional competence no longer carries the day.
Like Louis‑Napoleon, Trump uses performance and mythmaking to bypass the work of democracy, governing through image and spectacle rather than institutions. French Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—a book from the 1960s—has argued that modern life is dominated by spectacle, a social relationship mediated by images rather than direct experience. Once the line between fiction and non‑fiction is systematically blurred, gaslighting—as we might now elaborate—prevails as the preferred entertainment option. This framework offers insight into the United States, where Trump entered politics as a reality TV star, and where the entertainment business has long provided a substitute for honest reckoning with reality, beginning with the absorption of defeated Native Americans into Wild West shows. Eventually the entertainer would be president.
4. Vance’s Gaslighting: the Farcical Version
This brings us back to Vance’s latest pronouncement about the “lawlessness” of the Supreme Court. How should we situate this new act of gaslighting in relation to the tragic arc that Gordon and Marx help us trace?
On the one hand, the pattern is familiar. Once more, Vance accuses an institution of betraying shared values—in this case, the rule of law and constitutional fidelity—when it is in fact he and his political movement who have treated law as malleable and contingent, something to be bent until it snaps. Once more, he speaks in the name of the people, casting himself as defender of “American workers” and “supply chain resiliency” against an overreaching Court, even though the administration’s aggressive, unilateral tariff policies have been driven as much by theatrical nationalism and personal whim as by any coherent industrial strategy.
Once more, he invites his audience to see the world upside down.
But on the other hand, there is something unmistakably farcical about this particular performance. The word “lawlessness” here lands with a different resonance than in Munich. Then, Vance stood on foreign soil, practically next to Dachau and within walking distance of where Neville Chamberlain announced “peace in our time” after abandoning parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. He leveraged that setting to question Europe’s commitment to democracy. His gaslighting there was chilling because it struck at the heart of the fragile post‑war European consensus about “never again” and because it played directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes who would gladly see the transatlantic alliance fracture. It was chilling also because he had already embarked on a course at home that would increasingly constrain democracy and the rights of citizens.
By contrast, to accuse a Supreme Court that has largely abetted Trump’s agenda of “lawlessness” the moment it finally reins in one aspect of executive overreach has an almost self‑parodic quality. Vance’s statement reads less like a carefully crafted strategy to reshape global norms and more like a reflexive outburst, a pre‑fabricated slogan in search of an event. It is as if the rhetoric has become detached from any plausible description of reality. The Court’s decision, whatever its flaws or virtues, is exactly the kind of checking function that the separation of powers is designed to provide.
To label such a check “lawless” is to suggest that any limit on presidential discretion is by definition illegitimate—a view that, if taken seriously, would abolish the very idea of constitutional government.
The gaslighter starts to look less like a cunning manipulator and more like a man caught in his own hall of mirrors.
Farce, in Marx’s sense, is not just comedy; it is repetition without substance, gesture without genuine transformative power—even when it still does harm. Vance’s statement about “lawlessness” shares some of that quality. It repeats, in miniature and with diminishing returns, the logic that animated his Munich speech: accuse others of violating shared norms while you quietly hollow them out.
But the context has shifted. The administration’s attacks on elections, on the media, on independent regulators, on civil servants, on the very idea of truthfulness have already done enormous damage. The tragedy is well underway; liberal democracy’s “fatal flaw,” as Gordon calls it, has been starkly exposed.
In that setting, to brand a rare judicial effort to uphold the Constitution as “lawless” does indeed descend into farce. It is not that the stakes are suddenly low—they are not. But the language begins to strip itself of seriousness; it becomes a caricature of itself. The gaslighter starts to look less like a cunning manipulator and more like a man caught in his own hall of mirrors.
And one would think that ever more people see these dynamics for what they are. When it descends into farce, spectacle politics might just reach its limits.
5. The Dangers of Farcical Rhetoric—and Why This Is Still About Hope
There is still great danger here. Farce can prepare the ground for worse things. Louis Bonaparte’s early escapades—his failed coups, his grandiose self‑descriptions as a “volunteer of providence”—provoked mockery before they culminated in the very real coup of 1851. We should be wary of taking comfort in the absurdity of Vance’s remark. The fact that the statement is laughably inverted might signal that ever more people will see it for the gaslighting that it is—but it does not mean it is harmless.
Still, there is profound value in naming the transformation. Vance’s latest gaslighting gesture marks, I think, a turning point of sorts. When he denigrated European attempts to regulate disinformation as “Soviet‑era” and attacked AI safety advocates as enemies of opportunity, the gaslighting was aligned with real shifts in power: the fusion of government and platform capitalism, the erosion of international commitments, the spread of authoritarian “cancer.” That was gaslighting in the tragic key.
When he now calls a Court that has repeatedly deferred to the executive “lawless” because it has finally imposed a limit, his words take on a hollow ring. They expose the underlying fantasy of omnipotence: if you truly believe that “he who saves his country does not violate any law,” then any law that constrains you must appear illegitimate.
Marx feared that democracy might function as a machine for its own undoing, that universal suffrage would “with its own hand” draft its last will and testament. Gordon invites us to see Trump’s second ascent as precisely such a tragic consummation. Yet even in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx retained a grudging respect for the liberal concessions that earlier struggles had wrung from the state. Those concessions—independent courts, constitutional limits, the idea that no one is above the law—remain the fragile bulwarks against the nightmares of the present.
The Supreme Court’s decision on tariffs is one such concession made visible. It is imperfect, belated, and limited; but it is nonetheless an assertion that “regulate imports” does not mean “do whatever you like.” To defend that decision as a victory for the rule of law is not to idealize the Court or ignore its many failures.
It is to insist that there remains a difference between a state that occasionally restrains itself and a state that recognizes no internal limit at all.
A year into Trump’s second administration, we have reason to be hopeful. These are obviously not yet decisive victories, but they are more than mere straws in the wind. The year 2025 was a year full of elite failure. But Harvard has still not made a deal. Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air. Parts of the media are holding up independent standards of reporting. At least for now, the invasion of Greenland seems off the table. ICE has considerably reduced its presence in Minnesota, in response to both popular resistance and court rulings. District courts overall have been holding up well. Trump calls for the nationalization of elections, a stance that should make any traditional American conservative gasp for air. He quite obviously fears that the Republicans cannot keep the House when elections are fair and square. Clearly this is a sign of political panic. The next big day for the No King’s movement is March 28. And the Supreme Court has shown to the world that the rule of law still matters in the United States of America.
JD Vance, gaslighter par excellence, has offered a farcical reaction to that judgment.
So in spite of everything, there is ground for hope. The tunnel is very long, but there seems to be light at the end.
Image generated with ChatGPT (OpenAI)
