What Happens When Democracy’s Guardrails Fail? The Steady State focused this week on the growing erosion of democratic institutions in the United States and the broader West. Politicized intelligence, weakened diplomacy, judicial overreach, corruption, hybrid warfare, and fear-driven politics reveal a common thread: the replacement of expertise and truth with loyalty, ideology and personal power. […]
THE EXTREMISTS America’s most dangerous extremist threat is not ANTIFA but the far-right fringe of the MAGA movement, where racism, religious nationalism, and contempt for constitutional democracy increasingly converge to justify violence and authoritarianism. Extremists of all stripes claim to right great wrongs; to represent that which is self-sacrificing and noble; to lead the uninformed […]
Trump’s East Wing ballroom may become the ultimate political “long con” —a project sold as privately financed that gradually conditions the public to accept ever-expanding taxpayer commitments as inevitable and necessary. When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, he kicked off with a barrage of executive orders, ‘flooding the zone’ with more than the […]
The Chairman of the Board of The Steady State, Jim C. O’Brien, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 30 2026. His Opening Comments: “Thank you to the Committee for highlighting the importance of the Baltic Sea and the infrastructure under its surface. The Committee – and my fellow witness, Dr. Schmitt – […]
The State Department has been hollowed out. Career diplomats are afraid to speak. Unions have been derecognized. And a Heritage Foundation‑affiliated organization, the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, now functions like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union: you don’t have to join, but you won’t get ahead if you don’t. In this episode, former Ambassador Eric […]
The Revolution was won through alliances, humility about power, and relentless resolve—not bluster or unilateralism. As the nation marks 250 years, it falls to citizens—not politicians—to reclaim those truths and apply them to the present moment. In two months, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The signing of […]
The Supreme Court’s latest voting rights decision echoes its most infamous precedents, effectively removing Black Americans from meaningful political participation in multiple states and raising profound questions about the Court’s democratic legitimacy. In the aftermath of the Civil War and the disastrous presidency of Andrew Johnson, Congress in 1868 passed the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed […]
In the latest episode of the Sentinel, Peter Mina interviews Ambassador Eric Rubin, a 38‑year Foreign Service veteran, former president of American Foreign Service Association and current Steady State board member. Rubin describes how the Trump administration has dismantled the nonpartisan career foreign service, destroyed employee associations and affinity groups, and replaced them with a […]
The U.S. intelligence system was built to deliver hard truths to presidents, not affirm their instincts. Donald Trump is eroding the very foundation that makes American intelligence effective—and trustworthy. Speaking truth to power, providing U.S. presidents with non-partisan, deeply researched intelligence analyses, is America’s original contribution to intelligence. As former CIA historian Donald Steury noted […]