There are some moments in life where you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing. For me, one of those times was when I was walking up Wabash Avenue in downtown Chicago toward Trump Tower. Tired, I had taken the day off from work. My phone rang, and it was my boss. Getting such a phone call on a day off is rarely a good thing. I sighed, inhaled and answered.
He dispensed with a greeting. “Is this the coup?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Comey!” he said. “Trump fired Comey! Is this Trump’s coup?”
I smiled. “No. Not even close. That comes later, much later.”
But Donald Trump had stolen my day of peace. I turned around and walked back home.
That evening, I wrote an essay about what the crisis and shattering of norms would mean for America’s ailing democracy. I concluded:
[T]his state of emergency is the new normal in America. In the future, people who are now living will tell their children and grandchildren how they watched American democracy being surrendered to plutocratic authoritarianism and fascism in real time. These same children and grandchildren will ask, “Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?” What will we tell them?
History is watching. The American people now have to choose if they will be bystanders or agents in their own destiny. I am deeply saddened that so many Americans seem ready and willing to choose the first option.
I wrote this essay on the evening of May 9, 2017. Now, more than eight years later, those words still ring true — if not in a more damning way, given all that has happened in the intervening years. On Sept. 25, fulfilling his promise from years ago, Trump’s Department of Justice brought charges against former FBI Director James Comey.” In a 21st century American version of “show me the man, and I will show you the crime,” Comey was indicted by Lindsey Halligan, who served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers. His “crime” is allegedly giving false testimony as part of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“The fact remains that Comey is being persecuted, not prosecuted, for putting service to the nation above obedience to a man,” the Guardian’s Lawrence Douglas wrote. “As if following a script from the authoritarian playbook, Trump is making Comey pay for his act of constitutional fidelity.”
Trump and his MAGA followers are not moved by such criticisms and howls of protest. In fact, they welcome them — and they want more.
Ultimately, Trump views himself as a type of dictator and king who is anointed by God and is therefore outside of and above the law. He is now acting like he is the state, and why should he stop when he believes that he is right? Trump knows he is winning in advancing his agenda, that his MAGA followers remain enthralled to him and there are no real deterrents to stop him. The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, in de facto collusion with the MAGA Republicans in Congress, have also refused to place limits on Trump’s larger abuses of democracy and the rule of law.
“Chief Justice John Roberts gave Donald Trump an illegitimate license to weaponize the executive branch by orchestrating a grant of counter-constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump for whatever is deemed an ‘official act,’” said Lisa Graves, author of “Without Precedent: How Chief Justice John Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.” “Now, as a predictable and predicted result of that unprecedented edict, we are seeing Trump direct the attorney general — who was formerly paid as his private defense attorney — to wield the mighty powers of the Justice Department against those he deems his enemy.”
Graves describes Trump’s Supreme Court appointees — a group Trump calls “his judges” — not as “umpires” or even semi-neutral actors with their own ideological biases, but instead as extremists who “are acting like far-right operatives.”
Several people recently asked me who I think is next after Comey and what will happen to him during his prosecution. I don’t know. But the fact that we even have to ask the question embodies just how fast American democracy is collapsing.
Several people recently asked me who I think is next after Comey and what will happen to him during his prosecution. I don’t know. But the fact that we even have to ask the question embodies just how fast American democracy is collapsing. Comey’s indictment — and likely conviction — will surely be followed by others. Many others. Trump will demand it, and many Americans will want it too.
The Justice Department has already launched investigations against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. Other names that have been mentioned as potential targets include Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who brought charges against Trump in a 2023 election interference case, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray.
These names show that the unthinkable has become routine. Malignant normality is now the new normal.
Since Trump was first elected in 2016, America’s responsible political and media class have constructed a model of American politics and society that increasingly does not exist. The long-cherished ideals of institutions, American exceptionalism and the character of the American people have been thrown out the window. In many ways, those fantasies never matched reality in the first place — and now the gap is undeniable. For many, this truth is too frightening to face.
As America’s democracy rapidly collapses, there are public voices in the news media and political class who are warning about the evils of a new Red Scare. In reality, what the Trump administration and its forces are unleashing will likely be much worse.
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In an interview, Adam Hochschild, the prominent historian and award-winning author of books including “American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” was clear-eyed about what America is facing: “This is profoundly frightening because it’s right out of the playbook of the way democracies are converted to dictatorships.” He compared our present moment to what was happening a century ago in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The country, he said in an email interview, was “inflamed by military fervor…and then by paranoia,” which caused “severe damage to democracy.”
“The government shut down some 75 newspapers and magazines, and imprisoned hundreds of people — most notably Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs — solely for things they wrote or said,” Hochschild said. “Donald Trump would greatly like to do the same, as his attacks on critical media and prosecutions of people like James Comey show. But he is going one step further than this country went during the madness of the Red Scare of 1917-1921 by trying to seize control of electoral machinery. That, to me, is the most frightening thing about an already dangerous presidency.”
Commentators get hung up, he explained, on comparing Trump to Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who saw “subversives everywhere.” While noting similarities, Hochschild argued the better parallel is Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who, in his second term, “did all kinds of things Trump would like to do, such as throwing his critics in jail under the Espionage Act by the hundreds, and shutting down media that criticized him.”
But that wasn’t all. Under the 28th president, the Justice Department created the American Protective League, which Hochschild described as “a national vigilante force [that] scoured cities for suspected draft-dodgers.”
“We pay far too little attention to that ominous period of American life,” he said, “always preferring to look on the bright side rather than the dark side.”
Trumpism is the embodiment of Shakespeare’s observation that what’s past is prologue. It’s now our present and future. But this is not a call to despair, or to embrace the comfort of learned helplessness or to take poison of hopium. It is the opposite.
Unearned hope leads to despair. The way forward is to first accept the dire reality and then to engage in peaceful collective action that seizes the moral high ground, and never surrenders or compromises.The Black Freedom Struggle and long civil rights movements offer one such example. To paraphrase Hemingway: “A man alone ain’t got no bloody damn chance.”
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