Donald Trump continues to smash the conventional wisdom, norms, institutions, rule of law and U.S. democracy. He only returned to office three months ago, so he is just getting started. Moreover, Trump appears to greatly enjoy the chaos of his second term in office. He has no plans to leave office and has already hinted at his desire to seek a third term, in violation of the Constitution.
The so-called conventional wisdom, which consists of those taken-for-granted ideas, comfortable understandings of how things are supposed to work, and common sense that does not yield to new evidence, is no match for the shock and awe campaign of Trump and his MAGA movement and their allies. Their application of the German concept of “Gleichschaltung” (which means synchronization or bringing into line) to force universal compliance and remake society in the vision of Trumpism and American authoritarianism has proven too strong for the Democrats, civil society and the larger Resistance to stop. Ultimately, Donald Trump’s chaos and disorientation are the point; it is both the strategy and the goal. The chaos enables Trump and his allies and other enemies of democracy and a humane society to get and keep more corrupt power, a power without limits and unbounded in its ambitions and harm.
Trump declared “Liberation Day” as he debuted a historic global tariff regime, like it was a game show with him as the host. The spectacle caused the American stock market to lose trillions of dollars over the course of several days. Experts warned that these unprecedented tariffs – which included close trading partners such as Canada and Mexico – could cause a severe recession if not a depression. Several days later, Trump changed his mind and ordered a temporary pause on the largest tariffs, except for China – which has now retaliated against the United States with a 125 percent tariff.
As Donald Trump and his forces continue to quickly and easily smash the conventional wisdom and rubbleize American democracy and society, the mainstream political class, news media and other elites are experiencing a type of epistemic collapse.
Trump is escalating his campaign to crush dissent by targeting universities, colleges, law firms, media outlets, and other parts of civil society for investigations and punitive financial measures because they are deemed to be disloyal and engaging in un-American activities as defined by the administration.
The Trump administration, in open defiance of the Supreme Court, is refusing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Garcia is married to an American citizen, with whom he has one child. He also possesses a “green card” work permit, which legally allows him to be in the country. Garcia has been living in the United States for more than ten years. This is a constitutional crisis. Garcia was caught up in an ICE operation targeting Venezuelan gang members and then de facto disappeared and sent to the infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. Per the Trump administration’s own admission, he was wrongly “deported” from the country. Abrego Garcia is not the only person who has been held in legal limbo by the Trump administration as part of its crackdown on “illegal immigrants” and foreign “troublemakers.”
At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern explains this is worse than Kafkaesque horror:
This sneering resistance to the judiciary’s intervention was both entirely predictable and profoundly ominous. From the start, the U.S. government’s behavior in this case has been a conscience-shocking breach of both laws and norms that once stood as a firewall to safeguard all of our civil liberties. And it is now spiraling out of control. In a matter of days, Justice Department lawyers and administration officials have burned through basic legal duties in defense of a hideously unlawful scheme that seeks to permanently render innocent people to a black site. They have torched their credibility by violating the most fundamental obligations of candor to a court—not hesitantly, but proudly so, with undisguised disdain toward judges attempting to salvage whatever remains of the rule of law.
Calling this a constitutional crisis undersells the catastrophic implications of the emergency. This administration is rapidly constructing a legal framework that would allow it to abruptly disappear anyone, including natural-born U.S. citizens, to a foreign prison forever, for any reason it chooses, or no reason at all. Indeed, Trump teased this possibility on Monday, floating the deportation of “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador next. The stakes of the battle over Abrego Garcia’s fate could not be more evident: If the government succeeds in thwarting judicial repudiation of his deportation, it will mark the end of constitutional freedoms as we know them.
In a post on social media, political scientist Norm Ornstein also sounded the alarm about what Abrego Garcia represents: “Defying the Supreme Court, planning to spirit American citizens to El Salvador and saying that the courts have no role since it is a foreign country and the president has all foreign policy powers. We have entered the realm of full-blown fascism.”
In a very important, yet under-reported story, Donald Trump has ordered the United States military to take control of public lands on the U.S.-Mexico border, where it will have de facto police powers. This is an apparent violation of the intent and meaning, if not letter of the law, of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids, except under very narrow circumstances, the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
In a series of posts on social media, Elizabeth Goiten, who is senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, warns about the escalating probability of the US military being turned against the American people in a “national emergency”:
What’s this new executive order directing the Department of Defense to take over huge amounts of public land on the border? Simple: it’s yet another abuse of emergency powers—this one seemingly designed to make an illegal end-run around the Posse Comitatus Act.
It would make this thread far too long to list all of Trump’s abuses of emergency powers thus far. But the country is still reeling from the latest one: emergency tariffs imposed on every country in the world, including islands inhabited primarily by penguins.
And then there’s the abuse of the Alien Enemies Act—a law that applies only during an armed attack by a foreign nation or government—to stealthily deport 137 Venezuelans, 75% of whom have no criminal record whatsoever, to an El Salvador prison that’s a living hell.
But let’s talk about this newest one. Trump wants to step up the use of federal troops at the border, who are currently providing logistical support to DHS. But using them to arrest or detain migrants would be illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act.
The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) prohibits federal troops from enforcing domestic law unless there’s a statute that allows it. It’s a critical check on presidential power, for an obvious reason: an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny.
One way around the PCA is the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops to quell civil unrest or enforce the law in a crisis. Trump has indicated that he might invoke the Insurrection Act. But in the meantime, he appears to be trying a different approach….
It is high time Congress and the courts put an end to all of these power grabs. Immigration laws can and should be enforced through lawful means, without abusing emergency powers, misappropriating wartime authorities, or trying to skirt the Posse Comitatus Act.
There are many reasons why the American mainstream news media and other establishment voices in the political class and the elites are being outmatched by Donald Trump in almost every encounter. Primarily, they are adhering to obsolete norms and expectations about how a representative democracy, a two-party system and a tripartite government that is supposed to have a balance of powers should offer strong protections against extremists and others who would destroy the institutions and democracy itself from within, an obsession with consensus, American Exceptionalism as an inoculation from authoritarianism and fascism, a belief in the wisdom of crowds and how the American people supposedly almost always do the right thing in the end, the supreme nature of the rule of law, the strength of civil society, free and fair elections as a type of civil religion in America, and elected leaders and parties who are responsive to public opinion because they are afraid of being voted out of office and power. The role of hubris among the elites and other opinion leaders is also central to their ongoing failings in the Age of Trump: as a class such institutions and people imagine their legitimacy and authority as something enduring if not permanent instead of as contingent and vulnerable in the age of global authoritarian populism.
As Jeet Heer reflects upon in a new essay at The Nation, “Once Trump is defeated, America will need a reckoning with this elite failure. After all, if the ruling class can’t even defend the basic norms of liberal democracy, why should they be allowed to rule at all?” The mainstream American political and cultural elites shudder at the fact that Donald Trump is a world-historical figure. The American democratic experiment will be bifurcated as “BT” (before Trump) and “AT” after Trump.
As Donald Trump and his forces continue to quickly and easily smash the conventional wisdom and rubbleize American democracy and society, the mainstream political class, news media and other elites are experiencing a type of epistemic collapse where the world and their assumptions and theories about it are twisted and nullified.
However, it would be an error to describe the Age of Trump and the rise of American authoritarianism under Trump’s second administration as a paradigm shift where fundamental understandings of reality are changed and replaced by a new model. For example, the rejection of the heliocentric model of the solar system with one that accurately places the sun at its center.
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement and the larger authoritarian right-wing campaign against multiracial pluralistic democracy is not new or novel. They are following an old dictators’ and autocrats’ playbook that has been updated and modified from lessons learned in Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia to fit the specific weaknesses, vulnerabilities and culture of the United States. Moreover, to assert that Trumpism and the larger American authoritarian (and now fascist) movement is unique and/or unprecedented in America is to ignore, for example, America’s own history of White on Black chattel slavery, the Black Codes, and the Jim and Jane Crow racial authoritarian apartheid regime across the South and other parts of the country that was not defeated until the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and beyond.
What sociologist Joe Feagin describes as the white racial frame has blinded many, if not mos,t white Americans (and too many black and brown Americans as well) to the ugliness of America’s long history of authoritarianism both domestically and in support of it abroad. In his seminal 1935 essay “The Propaganda of History,” W.E.B Du Bois intervenes against a history that lacks context and is divorced from the full truth and facts in service to the political agenda of those who are writing and interpreting it in the present:
War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which national differences in the United States had led. And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from the Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War. On top of that, we passed by Reconstruction with a phrase of regret or disgust.
But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth? If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable
The Trump administration’s literal Whitewashing of the realities of the color line in American history (and the present) is Du Bois’ warning about propaganda as history necromanced in the 21st century.
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As I continue to chronicle the Age of Trump and this exhausting and stupefyingly rapid collapse of American democracy and civil society, I envision the American media as an institution, the Democratic Party, old-school Republicans and other elite defenders of “the system” and “normalcy” like the proverbial monks who are blindfolded and feeling an elephant in an attempt to make sense of what it is. Each monk feels a different part of the elephant and comes to the wrong conclusion about what the elephant actually is. With Donald Trump’s return to power, this great White Republican elephant is covered in broken glass, razor wire and spikes. The people who are feeling the elephant keep getting injured. The far easier solution is for them to take off their blindfolds and see the full scale of the monstrosity for what it is.
In his new essay at the LA Progressive, Henry Giroux writes that “We are not standing at the edge of fascism—we are living through its rehearsal, its staging ground, its opening act.”
The question is no longer whether we see it, but whether we have the will to stop it before the final curtain falls. Resistance offers no guarantees. But without it—if it falters, if it remains timid or fragmented—what dies is not only democracy as we know it, but the very possibility of imagining it anew.
[…]
The true danger lies not only in what the state enacts, but in what the public comes to accept as normal, even necessary. What is at stake is more than a culture of silence or the routine cruelty of a politics of disappearance—it is the slow, methodical construction of a fascist subject. This is a subjectivity shaped by fear, seduced by obedience, and ultimately stripped of the capacity to recognize—or reject—the very forces that dominate it. It is not merely that people surrender to authoritarianism, but that they are fashioned by it, habituated to its violence, until resistance feels futile and complicity feels natural.
Sometimes the horror is exactly as it appears. Beware the professional smart people and the other elites who maintain the boundaries of the approved public discourse and “the mainstream” and “the conventional wisdom.” They are trying to convince themselves (and the American public) that there must be some other explanation. In the end, inertia and clinging to the comfortable disproved conventional wisdom won’t save American democracy or the American people. Believe the authoritarian and the autocrat. He means what he says both literally and figuratively.
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