America is Under Attack

There will be ICE agents at key polling sites in November. We know this because it would be beyond facile to think that the Trump administration’s cycle of escalation has some natural terminus that just happens to approximate the events of the last ten days. Do you honestly think that masked men disappearing people in the streets, renditioning legal residents to third world concentration camps, deploying soldiers to politically disfavored cities, redrawing maps to steal people’s votes from them, and brazenly lying to defend the murder of a soccer mom was all just a setup to bring interest rates down by a thousand basis points because it’s fun to watch numbers next to stock prices get bigger?

Of course you don’t think that. But you don’t want to form a specific view on where this ends either. You assume politics is a crowded field and surely many other people are taking the relevant precautions and shoring up the guardrails. Centrist Republicans, the Democrats, the courts, the news media.

I have bad news. Each of those groups is flailing and failing spectacularly right now. The first doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe 3% of Republicans had some attachment to principle and broke off from the demagogue train. All the others got on it. The Democrats see each new crisis as a cheap ticket not to change a thing and simply reap the 4-point bump in the polls that falls short of giving them the power to actually do anything. The Supreme Court is tip-toeing around enjoining brazen illegality in the self-defeating hope that this preserves the administration’s willingness to abide by their future orders. The news media can’t help but be led along like a cat chasing a laser pointer with each new scandal erasing any memory of past scandals in a matter of days. Further, they can’t be asked to exercise *any* editorial judgment, including basic use of the five senses and common English words. Every story is “something happened, Republicans say good, Democrats say bad, here they are in their own words.”

Looking back at what’s happened in the past year brings into relief everyone’s failure to think even one step ahead:

1. Trump pardoned everyone who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and then rewrote the history of that day to vindicate a direct attempt to overthrow our elected government.

2. He ordered that citizenship be denied to people born on US soil, a direct attack on the Constitution.

3. He’s unleashed 20,000 largely untrained, unqualified, masked men in unmarked cars to roam American streets, assault and disappear people without warrants, probable cause, or evidence. Many citizens have been detained, several residents have died in custody, we’ve all been subjected to lawless violence on our streets.

4. He’s violated court orders barring him from flying freshly-detained residents out of the country without charges or a hearing to put them beyond the reach of our laws. Likewise with orders to return those people to the United States.

5. One of his goons murdered a mother in cold blood for objecting to this. The President and Vice President repeatedly, brazenly lied about evidence the public could see with their own eyes, calling her a terrorist.

6. He deployed the military to cities in peacetime without the consent of the people.

7. He has used personal loyalty to him as a litmus test for jobs and appointments. Federal contractors are required to denounce anti-Trump ideology and his woefully unqualified cabinet picks share only unblinking, unthinking loyalty to Trump the man in common.

8. Likewise, he’s weaponized federal contracts against his enemies, barring whole law firms from doing business with the government if any part of the firm ever represented his political enemies, taxing the legal representation of anyone who criticizes him.

9. He illegally halted congressional appropriations to foreign aid and domestic climate programs. Tens of thousands of the world’s poorest people died.

10. He’s illegally withheld funds from universities where he’s unpopular and launched a campaign to violate the first amendment rights of student visa holders by rescinding visas for students saying things he doesn’t like.

11. He’s stopped holding daily press briefings and revoked passes for major outlets (the Washington Post, CNN), replacing them with sycophantic morons from YouTube. He’s stripped funding from NPR, PBS, and scientific grants for climate research, labeling them “propaganda.”

12. He ordered Republican states to redraw their congressional districts to disenfranchise Democrats and gain unrepresentative seats for loyalists in his party.

13. He created TrumpCoin as a tool to accept bribes1 that have resulted in multiple pardons for drug and crypto criminals and further accepted bribes from illiberal states like Qatar, personally enriching himself by billions at the expense of the public.

14. He illegally started a trade war with every country on earth because of his personal theories of good policy, crippling jobs growth in manufacturing, raising consumer prices, and destabilizing the world economy.

15. He’s refused to release the Epstein files despite a Congressional subpoena, openly flouting the law and breaking his campaign promise.

16. He invaded Venezuela and killed hundreds without congressional authorization, sometimes violating the laws of war even beyond that. He’s threatened to invade Greenland, the sovereign territory of a peaceful, democratic country.

17. He illegally fired an independent FTC commissioner and brought fabricated charges against two members of the Federal Reserve Board for the purpose of directly controlling independent agencies that safeguard the US economy.

Draw the trend line. Trump is not leaving office. Or he’s going to pull some Putin-Medvedev scheme where a stand-in who swears to be following his orders steps in. This is under the assumption that his political opponents keep their voting rights long enough for these sorts of gimmicks to be necessary. We’ve watched other countries do this. Eventually the opposition candidates get arrested and the voting infrastructure gets taken over. Every accusation is a confession.

You say that sounds extreme. America? Turning into Russia? Seems unlikely. It’s not like that’s happened to a superpower before…

My challenge to you is to predict where this escalation stops and why. No other Fed governors will be indicted despite not going along with the interest rate scheme? Just because? This year’s elections will run smoothly and then two Democrat-majority houses have their votes respected by the administration, which putters along for two years and bows out gracefully? Specifically because that’s what they didn’t do last time?

My own prediction is like that of my friends who project the lines on AI capabilities charts forward: there’s no natural, predictable stopping point. By the time Trump dies, there’s a good chance his successors will have enough hard power—gerrymandered districts, paramilitary voter intimidation, and state-level control over vote counting—that they don’t need Trump’s cult of personality.

The more optimistic story is that things unfold like last time. Amped up voter intimidation and election denial isn’t enough to stop Democrats from taking back the White House in 2028. Of course the Republicans lie and claim fraud with abandon, but they walk away on January 20, 2029 and we pick up the pieces for four years.

At a minimum, I think you have to concede that Trump will try harder to defeat American democracy than he did in 2020. Remember that he wasn’t starting wars, defying court orders, or fabricating criminal charges against independent officers then. It’s plausible that he’ll move to arrest the Democratic nominee or president-elect in 2028. Perhaps his security forces will just lock the new administration out of federal buildings and accounts.

In that case, it will come down to the military to honor their oaths to the Constitution. That seems like a “maybe” at best. They know civil violence would be an indelible scar on American history. They might think, even in that dark hour, that there’s still some way to “muddle through,” only to spend the subsequent years being eroded away themselves.

Even if they have the resolve, the whole military may be unable to get on the same page and follow orders from the legal commander in chief. Then either outcome is tragic. All this against the backdrop where Trump is already making life difficult for honorable service members who care about the law to continue in their posts today.

Again: where is this going? Where does it end? These are the questions you have to answer if you want to justify ignoring this slow rolling attack on America.

If, like me, you don’t see a clear end to this, the imperative is to keep a level head at the same time you embrace the urgency. Unfortunately, this moment we’re having with Jerome Powell and Renee Good will pass like all the rest. Each moment like this has revealed some cracks in Trump’s dam, but people’s attention moves on too quickly to the next crisis or distraction. But we do know there will be a next crisis and it’s probably only weeks away. Now is the time to build infrastructure to respond effectively next time.

We need phone campaigns to moderate Republicans. Even if ICE will come in to save their seat in November, I don’t think they’re banking on that.

Also, just because the November election will be under assault doesn’t mean we can’t force good outcomes anyway. The vote counting systems still seem robust. We can get people to pound the pavement and register folks. Have them vote early and vote by mail. Physically protect ballot drop boxes.

Most importantly, we can find ways to communicate better. Just the facts, just the things that matter to voters. At scale. We manufactured a whole vibecession two years ago; we can get people to see the actual threat to their way of life in front of them now.

Finally don’t give into or even indulge your anger. So much has gone wrong. And it’s gone wrong in no small part due to deep moral failings. If our society were a group of 30 intimate friends, expressing fury would be a credible signal that we’ve been profoundly wronged. Americans are not intimate friends though. We don’t know each other well enough for that and we don’t understand our situation. We haven’t—and can’t—have pre-supposed trust across 300 million people such that when one of us is furious, the others take it seriously.

Our best disposition is calm and strength. Build trust by demonstrating understanding and articulating a plan. It’s a sad irony that that is a large part of how Trump has gotten as far as he has: evincing total detachment and lack of emotion in his false descriptions of America as a ruinous hellscape. He is turning it into that hellscape. As appalling and evil as that is, people don’t understand. What they’re looking for is someone to dispassionately (but perhaps simply, and engagingly) explain what’s going on. I’m sure I have fallen short here. America’s finest public servant did not fall short yesterday: