The Government We Got

Eight years ago, the New York Times did a feature on the musician Tom Waits, who later emailed the following anecdote to the reporter. It wasn’t clear what Waits was trying to communicate, but the timing, less than a month into the first Trump administration—had the feel of prophesy.

“I was a firefighter when I was 19 or 20. I was trying to get out of the draft and I thought of it as a good place to hide. I was working out of a fire station in a tiny town called Jacumba. One night at maybe 3 a.m., the bell sounded. This was the real thing. I slept in my clothes and only had to put on my boots, and down the pole onto the truck and the siren was blasting and I am hanging onto the ladder and my heart is going like a drum and I am panting hard.”

“It was late and all of a sudden the aroma of fried chicken envelops our truck and we begin to slow and there it is, roaring and crackling: a chicken ranch on fire. The old farmer couple, Mom and Pop, are holding each other in silhouette as their world burns. The captain says: ‘WAITS!!! Take that hose and start putting out some of these chickens.’ So there I am aiming at these flying, screaming, burning chickens, and I had never seen a chicken fly before, but boy can they fly. There had to be a hundred or so of them and the blast of water would douse the fire and they would come crashing to the ground — and then another and another. There was no time to think or prepare.”

“It was an emergency, and when dealing with emergent behavior there is nothing to do but respond. I was in the moment. And it was not the fire I imagined or dreamed of. It was the fire I got.”

In this metaphor, the Trump administration is the devastating fire and we are the huddled farmers. To the extent firefighters exist, they are the lawyers and judges and one or two Democrats who are trying to put out the flaming chickens. 

The flaming chickens? Let’s peruse the news today. Trump has gone ahead with his illegal tariffs, starting a trade war with Canada and Mexico, our two closest allies and trading partners (for good measure, he tacked an additional 10% onto existing Chinese tariffs). Trump and Vance sandbagged Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of our ally Ukraine in the White House, and quickly aligned US foreign policy with Russia (not an ally). 

Trump announced plans to illegally ignore the Endangered Species Act and raze the trees on all federal lands. 

His unconfirmed, unelected henchman, Elon Musk, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme while the administration announced plans to fire 7,000 workers (12% of the agency’s workforce), shutter 60% of its regional offices and 45 field offices. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden called it a “prelude to privatization.” 

Meanwhile, measles, a disease once declared “eliminated,” burns through Texas, forcing anti-vax champion and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. to actually mouth some words about how maybe the measles vaccine isn’t so bad. Nevertheless, one of the agency’s senior officials and a long time Trump insider, Tom Corry, had seen enough and quit HHS after <checks notes> two weeks of employment.

Inside the White House, this is all awesome stuff. They promised a chicken roast and by god we’re getting flaming chickens ans fast ans Trump can pen executive orders. Outside the White House, reality looks a little darker. The Dow has shed more than 3% of its value since the tariff announcement (as of 10:30 am Pacific time), and the Atlanta Fed predicts the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8% in the first quarter of the year. Core inflation is rising again, as is unemployment, even though the federal layoffs haven’t figured in to the latest numbers. After getting torched by their own constituents, Republicans have decided to end town hall meetings with them. Oh, and for good measure the government might shut down in ten days. 

In the middle of a disaster, there often isn’t a lot to do. I’ve been using a different metaphor for all of this: a hurricane. You can board up the windows and get out of the way, but the hurricane is coming. If it hits your house, it’s going to do what it’s going to do. We peasants are powerless to stop tariffs or reverse the stock market collapse. Trump and the Republicans won their elections and they control the government. Much of what they’re doing is illegal, and lawyers and judges may stop some of it. We can take certain actions, like throwing ourselves in front of logging trucks come to steal our 600-year-old trees. But this is window-boarding. The hurricane—or chicken ranch fire—is upon us. 

When dealing with a coup by the people we elected, there is nothing to do but respond. It was not the government we imagined or dreamed of. It is the government we got.

Administrative Terrorism

Last Saturday afternoon, when most federal workers were home for the weekend, Elon Musk’s hijacked Office of Personnel Management sent out an email to employees asking them to provide "approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” On X Musk added that: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

The Trump administration has taken a lot of dumb, cruel, and short-sighted actions in its first 39 days, but this took the cake as the weirdest and seemingly least likely to be a real thing (to the extent that reality has meaning anymore with this regime). It just didn’t make any sense. Why did it come out over the weekend? Why did OPM put a two-day time limit on the response time? Who could possibly read and evaluate the emails even if they were sent back?

And what about Musk’s threat to fire anyone who didn’t comply? Aside from its plain illegality, it is a literally insane way to reduce a workforce. Instead of firing non-critical personnel who kept the government functioning, it would randomly prune essential workers. The whole thing was so bizarre and unbelievable that within hours departments within the government—who of course had no prior heads up—began telling their staff to ignore the email, including the DOJ.

Everyone wondered: was this anything more than a little spur-of-the-moment trolling by a ketamine-addled mind? (Trump, whose mental stability has never been a strength, later piled on, saying: "Those million people that haven't responded, though [to] Elon, they are on the bubble ... maybe they're gonna be gone.“) Like so much in the second Trump administration, it had a the quantum reality of Schrödinger’s cat, both true and actionable and pure fantasy at the same time.

Going after workers randomly doesn’t make any sense if you’re thinking about efficiency or the deficit. Payroll only accounts for about 6% of the federal budget, and indiscriminately firing workers will make the government less efficient, not more. But that misses the point.

The chaos isn’t a failure to implement a coherent plan: the chaos is the plan. The strategy here—spelled out in Project 2025—is wrecking the “deep state,” and its core is the federal workforce.

DOGE’s is committed to dismantling the federal government (what they call “the administrative state”). It’s a radical but decades-old effort to gut the federal government and radically scale back regulations, protections, and any programs that benefit the poor or non-White. Tick through the list of agencies and you see functions that conservatives oppose outright, want to farm out to the private sector, or take over to enhance their own power and/or wealth.

Standing in their way are people were drawn to civil service precisely to ensure those protections and programs. I have a good friend who works as a suicide-prevention counselor at the VA, working to keep traumatized vets alive. Others are invested in funding research into disease cures, or making sure our roads and bridges don’t crumble, or finding better ways to educate our kids, or keeping planes from crashing into each other. Many of them could have made more money working in the private sector, but for them money wasn’t a primary life goal—improving the world was.

Elon does not understand this. He thinks of public service as a refuge for the mediocre, those who can’t cut it in the private sector. When OPM offered federal workers a sack of cash to quit, he no doubt expected a flood of resignations. Of course, it turns out the workers didn’t get into their jobs for sacks of money, and weren’t going to quit for them, either.

What has transpired since then is a campaign of administrative terrorism to get them to quit. DOGE hasn’t explicitly threatened them with physical harm, but the legal and financial menace is everywhere. DOGE has used the threat of firing to bully workers by accessing their personal and employment records, doxing them (which is tinged with violence), targeting certain classes of workers under the rubric of DEI, or when they can, undermining the very agencies that gave their work meaning. 

Perhaps in another post I can discuss the whole background behind the comservative antipathy to the federal government, but dismantling it is the real purpose of firing all these workers. The function of government will grind to a halt if enough people leave. And since they won’t leave on their own, Musk is deploying this administrative terrorism to force them out.

So far, federal employees have shown incredible resilience and mettle in standing fast. The courts have been somewhat supportive of the workers, but DOGE has also managed to find pressure points, firing vulnerable workers still working on probationary contracts, or claiming they have bad performance records. So, since the chaos is the point, it will continue. If you understand what the real intention is, these tactics start to make sense.

The Administration Isn’t Just Trolling Anymore

A new feeling of dread crept up on me this week—though the stream of news wasn’t hugely different than in recent weeks. Still, I can’t shake the sense that some important load-bearing walls supporting our democracy have collapsed. 

It’s not just because so much is happening. This week was another bad one, as Trump: allied with Russia against our ally Ukraine; announced plans to seize the postal service (one of the few explicitly-enumerated Constitutional powers of Congress to oversee); seized control over independent regulatory agencies; and declared that there were just two sexes. 

Rather, it felt like this was the week the adminstration decided it was time to own its fascism and explicitly use its power to attack its enemies, internal and external, political and private, large and small. Trump’s insane, drug-addled billionaire trigger-man has made no secret of this project, but this week I had the feeling that the highest levels of the administration had publicly blessed his assault. Whatever gray the administration had previously used to color their remarks, this week became black and white. 

One example. Speaking in Munich, VP Vance made this (scantly-covered) statement: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. It is the threat from within.”

This is classic fascism, which is both traditional and revolutionary. Within a decadent and corrupted society lies an enemy, the fascists argue, an other who must be vanquished to restore the nation’s purity. The strange paradox of fascism is arguing it is at once both weak—here a fascist leader will cite the threat of a weak minority group—as well as strong (the leader is the only one who can restore things). Together, grievance and strength work to unite the underclass with the leader and build a fascist movement. 

We have seen a concerted assault on “DEI,” and transgendered Americans in particular, from the administration that is straight from this playbook. Of course, the anti-DEI stuff is Jim Crow dressed up in 21st century clothes, and which includes all non-white minorities as well as women. As Trump moves to consolidate power, his administration becomes more explicit about its enemies and their vulnerability at the hands of the state. It’s a kind of public, performative terrorism that identifies the enemy and justifies any action taken against them. 

Trump’s onslaught has been so broad and chaotic we haven’t often been able to see a strategy beyond soothing the grievances of a president’s wounded pride. The Elon stuff, under the aegis of DOGE, has seemed of a piece with GOP goals dating at least to Reagan. Yet running through all these actions has also been an element of malice and revenge that seemed to take form, like an awakened golem, this week. (I started writing this yesterday, before the email threatening federal workers landed in their inboxes. More terrorism.)

When Trump quoted Napoleon this week—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”—it seemed less like his usual trolling and more like a warning. His threat to absorb the post office into his administration—an agency the Constitution explicitly places under Congressional authority; his comment that “no judge should be allowed to rule against” him; hinting that the “J6 choir” would perform at the newly-seized Kennedy Center: these are the promises of lawlessness. Trump is going out of his way to find laws to break, unambiguously, so that even the New York Times won’t be able to find an argument that “actually it’s not that bad…” Trump is the law, and he will do what he wants. 

Lawlessness and capricious assaults on the “enemy within” are the stuff of the darkest regimes. For a month, we’ve all tried to squint and see a way in which Trump wouldn’t shatter the republic or ways in which the republic could still restrain Trump. In the past, a certain ambiguity inflected Trump’s trolling and inoculated him against legal and political culpability. This week, the administration dispensed with ambiguity. Maybe it’s just getting sloppy. Maybe we can convince ourselves there’s something here left to save. 

I’m not betting on it. The ambiguity is out because Trump no longer feels constrained by law or politics. And the implications of that can’t be both-sided. 

The Law is Not Going to Save Us

As the Trump administration continues to dismantle the federal government, we are all wondering if any of this can be reversed or even stopped. Obviously, the supine GOP-led Congress isn’t going to tap the brakes, which leaves the judiciary.  Early rulings seem positive, and institutionalists on both sides are hoping judges save the day. Indeed, this has become the singular political battle of our time. In our conceptual hierarchy of authority, we tend to see capital L law as the sovereign, and grubby politics its embarrassing vassal. That isn’t and has never been the relationship, though, and constitutional law has always been entirely conceptual, provisional, and nonbinding. We should consequently reconsider not just how much hope to invest in the court cases, but how much we invest in the “law” as anything but an instrument of political will. 

The U.S. Constitution is a weird document. As the beta version of a democratic constitution, it rests on entirely untested assumptions the framers held. They got the fundamentals right, recognizing that power concentrates, but misunderstood how that might play out. Today we talk about parties as the fulcrum of power. The founders didn’t foresee that. 

They thought that by establishing co-equal branches of government, those entities would jealously protect their turf—Congress versus the President, not Democrat versus Republican. As James Madison put it in Federalist 51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.” This is the foundation of the Constitution’s system of “checks and balances.” 

Of course, parties eventually upended the power dynamics the framers intended to undermine, but even by its own logic, the constitution was flawed. The first unintended consequence materialized almost instantly: in a government with three entirely equal branches, who has final say when different branches get in a scrap, as they did in 1801? The answer came in 1803 in the Marbury vs Madison case, which Wikipedia summarizes very nicely:

“Marbury v. Madison was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law. It established that the U.S. Constitution is actual law, not just a statement of political principles and ideals. It also helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the federal government.”

That sounds comfortingly final, doesn’t it? In reality, it is no more than a handshake agreement among leaders, one revocable the moment a sufficiently bold president says, “Yeah, nah.” We will probably see how meaningless this arrangement is when the Trump administration decides to ignore a court ruling. Exactly which soldiers will the Supreme Court dispatch to enforce it? The Supreme Court’s authority rests on the president’s agreement not to challenge it. Which, well…

It is a stinging irony that the person who saw through this fiction was Donald Trump, a man so ignorant and incurious he understands very little else about governing. His own legal adventures taught him that the law isn’t a quasi-scientific program that churns out findings based on the facts plugged into it—though this is the way most of the legal and political establishment sees it. He has known for decades that it is a lump of clay waiting for the strongest forces to mold it.

The assertion of an objective law has always been refuted by its application. The Dred Scott case, which established that Black people could never become US citizens, was an early standout in politics masquerading as law, but there have been many more. 

I’ve always been amazed the interpretation of our various Bill of Rights hasn’t been the subject of more existential panic, to take another example. Consider the ways the second and fourth amendments were interpreted. In the 2nd, we have landed on an interpretation that expands the (poorly-written) text to guarantee each citizen the right to bear just about any gun they wish. This is not present in the language of the text, nor did the framers argue that interpretation at the time. So here the Court has used a maximal interpretation of liberty to serve certain political goals. 

In the 4th, however, which was supposed to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Court has whittled away the clear-text protections to the point where cops now burst into people’s homes in the middle of the night, guns blazing. They have been permitted extremely broad latitude to search private property—cars and homes—and if they suspect a citizen of a crime, seize and sell that property before the accused has been convicted. In this case, the amendment has been substantially limited, again to serve political goals. 

Which means: the law isn’t going to save us. For forty years, conservative advocates have advanced increasingly fringe legal theories, many of which have in time become the law. They’ve spent millions advancing jurists who are faithful to their beliefs, rather than independent legal thinkers. GOP-appointees are, in other words, politicians in robes (google “federalist society” for more). One of their bedrock beliefs is that the bulk of the federal government is illegitimate, and they have been attempting to use the judiciary to dismantle it for decades. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Federalist Society judges in good standing, as well as about half the judges in lower courts. Trump is currently attempting to <check notes> dismantle the federal govenment. So don’t be surprised if they somehow find a way to call Trump’s measures “constitutional.”

Trump’s actions will take years to work their way through the courts, and he’ll suffer the kinds of setbacks he has the past couple weeks—but lower-court stays are hardly the last word. The Supreme Court may try to restrain some of the administration’s especially bad acts—they did this in Trump I—but they will be substantially in favor of his intent, if not his ham-handed legal rationalizations. And I do expect that an unrestrained Trump is itching for an opportunity to defy the courts altogether. So no matter how compliant they are, don’t be surprised to see that if the Supreme Court tries to inhibit Trump, he will ignore them. 

I can’t imagine anyone is still reading this, but one more point. Lawyers always have arguments. As non-employee Elon Musk is rooting around our most protected information, the administration has arguments. In 2020, his legal team tried to overturn an election. Again, they had briefs and arguments that, despite getting fewer votes, Trump nevertheless somehow won the states he lost. No matter how indefensible an act is, attorneys will defend it. That’s their job.

We mortal humans, and this is especially true of the press, don’t have the technical knowledge to parse these arguments. The law is, by design, a he-said, she-said proposition. It’s not like one side is going to stand up and say, “Look, we know our case is as bogus as it is stupid, but we’d still like you to rule in our favor.” We are going to have to listen to the argument and make that judgment ourselves. The media definitely won’t do this, and most Americans can’t do this.

In healthy democracies, people can trust the judicial process. We don’t have to know what the case law is, what the precedents are, what the constitution says, because the courts will sort that out. Most Americans still believe we live in a functioning democracy, so as rulings emerge in the coming years, we will accommodate ourselves to them. That is what we have done since 1803. It’s baked into the cake of our democratic system. And it will mean that most people will accept the rulings, the way they did Plessy and Dred Scott and Korematsu and Bush v Gore and Citizens United and Dobbs and Trump v US. 

This is what humans do: we accept and adapt. We have seen a similar dynamic in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey (etc). The Supreme Court’s approval ratings will drop, and Americans will report that they think the justices are partisan, and they’ll accept the rulings because, after all, what’s the alternative? 

The alternative is to recognize that the judiciary was never more than a gentlemen’s agreement and that it has no special powers that place it above politics. That it is a function of politics. I would encourage everyone to come to that recognition sooner rather than later, and in the meantime 🤞.

A Coup is Happening; Do You See It?

Elon Musk, apparently still a private citizen, has seized control of the federal government. This is not an exaggeration: he and his team (who are?—we don’t know) now control the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. He earlier commandeered the records of federal employees, and locked them out of these databases. 

Donald Trump has started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, not just ancient allies, but integrated partners in our economy. (Economist Paul Krugman: “North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products — autos in particular, but manufactured goods more broadly — typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times.”) 

I’ve been keeping a tally of the administration’s major acts in the past two weeks, and it is now up to 51 items. Things like:

2. Issued EO nullifying “birthright citizenship” of 14th amendment;

3. Pardoned all J6 criminals;

15. Withdraw from Paris Accords;

32. Created “memecoins” for himself and Melania with unknown major investors;

35. Disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (working out well already!);

40. Froze all foreign aid;

46. Began firing FBI agents and supervisors who investigated Trump’s crimes;

49. Ordered Army Corps to “turn on the faucet” and flood fields with 1.6 billion gallons of water from Central California reservoirs, apparently believing it would somehow flow to Los Angeles. 

Human brains are extraordinary mechanisms, perhaps most noteworthy for their capacity to synthesize data points into usable information, mainly in the form of story. This happens almost instantly and is so seamless that most people fail to notice the moment data transmutes into narrative. A flash of silver color is data, but our mind synthesizes it into meaning: a SUV driving down the road. And our mind might go further, telling a story about who must be driving that car, why they chose that model, what their values and ethics are. If that flash of silver turned out to be an EV or a Tesla, our story shifts immediately and we understand its meaning in very different terms. 

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with judicial reporter Dahlia Lithwick. She discussed the legality of Trump’s two week reign (none in many cases), and expanded on the role of a judiciary placed by Donald Trump to rubberstamp these very acts. It was a dark and disturbing discussion, one of the few to lay out in stark terms how desperate things have gotten. 

And then, at the end of the conversation, her mind broke. She went into this bizarre tangent about how great it was that government employees have been standing up to argue that the work they do is important. “I love that,” she said, going on to argue that the only thing that will stop a speedy restoration of the past two weeks are people failing to have “a discourse.” Her voice sweetened as she thought of democracy rising up to put things right. After a fifteen minute discussion where she made the case that Trump and the GOP have fractured our democracy and offered us no recourse, her mind retreated to a happy place where none of this was really happening. 

We are in the early stages of a coup that will lead in directions no one can predict.   Trump and his team, busily enacting Project 2025 precisely as they outlined before the election, know where they want to go, but they are not the only actors here. To me, the most destabilizing fact of this moment is that the other actors, the Democratic leaders in the Congress, local politicians, corporations, the media, the portions of the judiciary not captured by the Federalist Society—none of them seem to realize that a coup has happened. Like Lithwick, their brains can’t go there. 

Our wonderfully creative, synthetic minds create realities we can comprehend, and ones that make the world comprehensible. Most Americans literally cannot conceive of a reality in which the federal government is overthrown by a dimwitted narcissist whose lies are as tangled and dumb as his hairdo. And so for them that reality doesn’t exist. 

Since the election, I have been trying to think what I, a single citizen, can do amid a coup. It is very little because the mechanisms that used to empower the people are the very ones under assault. The one thing that would be very helpful, however, is if regular citizens could actually bring themselves to see what is plainly happening in front of our eyes. Many of us had the luxury of living in our little fantasy worlds before the election. There was no cost to thinking everything would be all right. The cost now is that the coup will succeed or fail depending on our response in the coming days and weeks. If we can’t see that a coup is under way, if our imagination isn’t large enough to accept this story of our reality, the cost will be very dear. It may not seem like much, but bearing witness in these times is so critical. 

I believe a resistance will organize itself such that individual citizens can take action (meanwhile, write or call your leaders and put a fire under their dazed butts). In the meantime, we need to develop the skill of seeing reality for what it is. A coup is underway in the United States. Do you see it?

All The Things the Trump Administration Will Bring

It’s going to be a very long 1,461 days. If we’re lucky, it will only be 1,461 days, and if we’re very, very lucky, we might be able to piece our fragmented democracy back together. There is no scenario in which many bad things don’t happen, however. 

I am not breaking any news here. Because of Trump’s unstable personality, not to mention the dysfunction of the congressional GOP, it’s hard to guess how things will play out and guessing is not time well-spent. For me it’s more helpful to think of categories of worry—within these, trouble is guaranteed, if not specific details. 

1. Corruption. Americans have never seen serious corruption before. We’ve had corrupt politicians—men like Menendez who take bribes for favors. But it’s been a century plus since the *system* was corrupt (though less in the South). We got a foretaste of what this will look like with Supreme Court justices taking large, unreported gifts from billionaires with many interests before the court. 

Trump is going to make that look tame. In his first term, he made a mockery of emoluments, coaxing foreign governments to use his hotel and Mar-a-Lago as they came calling to affect U.S. policy. Now he will accept open bribes. Tariffs? Exemptions available if you make certain donations. Regulations short-circuited? Mining rights opened? Certain mergers approved? Safety laws dumped? No problem! Just buy some TrumpCoin and we’ll put this issue at the top of the list. 

The ways Trump can monetize being president with the DOJ, courts, and Congress aligned with him are going to be something to witness. He will also be running his usual kinds of Trump Steaks scams, penny-ante, obvious frauds that are beneath a mail carrier, what to speak of a president. They will be so many and so resplendent we will soon lose track of them. 

Worse, government itself will be oriented toward corruption. Trump will direct agencies to benefit wealthy patrons, political cronies, and allies. This stuff is going to be legion and people are going to mostly ignore it. Republicans have already perfected the mechanisms of much of this over the past 45 years, so the wheels are well-greased. The President oversees the vast federal governments, and agencies have broad latitude to direct their resources where he wishes (sadly, still “he”). So the IRS can either conduct the business for which it was designed—taxing and gathering revenue—or it can be an engine for rewarding favors to rich friends. Gut the agency and tell workers to go after lower-income Americans and the IRS is still doing work, but it’s doing *your* work. The FDA, Transportation, Interior, Ag, Energy—these will become the mechanism of a vast spoils system. 

2. Punishing political foes. We have never seen a president to use the power of the DOJ to go after his antagonists (or protect himself from his own corruption), so this will be a little startling. Yet it won’t be unprecedented: Trump signaled his instincts in the way he attacked enemies in the Andrew McCabe case (indeed, everything I’m worried about has precedents in Trump’s first term). 

Trump employs a mob boss’s sensibility to punishment and reward, so this will likely be capricious and negotiable. The more foes who bend the knee, take deals, and so on, the stronger his hand. We’ve seen a shocking amount of pre-obeying already, so I wouldn’t expect many to stand their ground. This is, needless to say, total banana republic stuff. It is the foundation of autocracy. Trump’s choice of Pam Bondi for AG is a five-alarm fire—she is a complete sycophant and is happily signing up to become Trump’s trigger-man. 

3. Red states. Trump won’t be the only one pushing the envelope. Red states are going to test laws that wouldn’t remotely pass constitutional muster in normal times, with a normal judiciary. Some of these will affect voting rights, others will attack civil and possibly racial liberty, and others might test novel theories about state power to control their borders or women’s access to contraception or the flow of commerce. They will be significant because they’ll move through the courts and some will get judicial approval. At that point, they can become national law as well. 

4. Foreign policy. The President has nearly unrestrained control over U.S. foreign policy and the military. In addition to more opportunities for corruption—and this has always been an area soft for corruption, anyway—Trump can literally upend world politics. Americans don’t really get foreign policy and thanks to saber-rattling (Saddam Hussein is the greatest and most dangerous monster since Hitler! Iran is an existential threat!), they have felt the world a dangerous place even since the fall of the Soviet bloc. But for the U.S. and our allies it has been good, safe times. 

Every indication is that Trump isn’t happy with this stability—and why would he? Chaos has always been his friend. Again, predictions are a mug’s game, but figures like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noem are very telling. Russia/Ukraine and China are the biggest worries, but with Trump putting Greenland and Panama on the table, basically anything is possible. 

The bigger issue the potential chaos unleashed by a United States no longer trusted by allies. South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine are in the immediate crosshairs, but the instability would ripple across the world. The Democratic world has guided international relations for most of the past century, restraining actors like China and Russia. If the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner on team democracy, it strengthens our enemies. A chaotic world is a dangerous one. This could be disastrous. 

5. The system’s reactions to these stresses. Whether things are merely bad or catastrophic will depend on the way various internal and external mechanisms react to all these stressors. Will the judiciary enable or restrain Trump and red states? Will military leadership stop Trump if he attempts something insane and/or unconstitutional? (If they did, that would trigger a major constitutional crisis—and that would likely be the *better* outcome, just to illustrate haw dark times are becoming.) How will agency heads respond to Trump’s pressure? These internal gears can either spin freely and speed Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda, or be gummed up and slow it. 

Then there are the outside actors—the media, Democrats, business leaders, and the public. Will they take personal and financial risks to oppose this agenda, or go along to get along, figuring that it will be safer to comply? (Early indications are not encouraging.)

There are a couple of other things I’ll be watching. A number of people have pointed to the narrow margin in the House, the fractious GOP coalition, and Trump’s many deficits as reasons for hope: his incompetence and stupidity, age-related decline, and status as an instant lame duck. Again, if we’re lucky, these factors may mitigate the worst outcomes. But let’s be clear, things are going to be bad, immediately, no matter how chaotic and dumb Trump is. He has a lot of power, unified government, and the experience of a first term. I don’t think people are doing themselves any emotional favors thinking it’s going to be all right. It’s not. 

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. The last thing I’ll be looking at is the way blue states battle all these forces. Trump and the GOP will have a free hand to do a bunch of bad things—but they can’t do *all* the bad things. Blue states can help slow things down. They just need to take a page out of the GOP playbook, and resist in all the ways the law allows. A big part of managing the second Trump term is slowing it down. 

Moreover, blue states can also pass a bunch of laws that contrast sharply with the direction of the federal government. In terms of creating a contrast in visions that actually break through a lazy and incurious public, this is our best bet. The parties have radically different visions for the U.S., and they have ground Washington to a stalemate—which has been part of the reason these visions haven’t broken through in the minds of that dozing electorate. 

States are a different matter. Dems have complete control of 15; the GOP 23. They are passing starkly different laws and that split is going to get even more dramatic. So we need good, effective leadership that addresses the real needs of citizens in blue states. If Trump and the GOP are the disaster we expect, a competing vision is critical.

Finally, and most importantly, I hope we all take care of ourselves. The sun will still rise each morning and most of the things that make our lives joyful and meaningful will still be close at hand. Trump will make our lives tangibly worse, and for some of us, much, much worse. But that makes it even more important that we don’t grant him control of our inner lives. Both for our own wellbeing and as members of a resistance movement, it’s important not to fall into a depressive hole. Things will get worse. We will persevere. 

✊

What Does the Ash Tree Say?

Well folks, yesterday was grim. Grimmer even than I expected. I take comfort in my canine companion, however, who seemed unaware of the events of the day. She is a sundog, so despite the chill, she was full of energy—when she wasn’t snoozing in the rays. 

Looking for other opinions, I consulted our ash tree, but they were silent. (Pronoun intuited.) That is not surprising; if we’ve learned anything from Tolkien, it’s that trees are insensitive to human affairs, and very slow to speak. 

A mugging of crows gathered on the roof. (The congregation was two shy of a full murder.) They had been pecking the metal cover on the bathroom’s fan vent, which brought me into the back yard to investigate. I listened to them as they chatted, and although my crow is a bit rusty, they seemed to be joking about messing with the humans. They glanced at me and smirked. 

I studied the squirrels and shrubbery for signs of disturbance, but could detect no change. As far as I can tell, all the four-leggeds and two-wingers and deep-rooteds were unaware of, or unalarmed by, the winds of change in Washington. 

You may argue that a squirrel or fern is hardly the best authority to consult regarding legally-dubious executive orders. Point taken. I have no idea where that fern did her undergraduate work. And yet, I couldn’t help finding solace in their stolid, untroubled ways. Or perhaps it was just too early to rouse them to action. I will observe them again today and report back.