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April 7, 2025
In Uncertain Times, We Cannot Stay Silent
April 7, 2025
1. Factors
Three items of note:
(1) Over the weekend scores of thousands of Americans attended mass protests against the Trump/Musk regime. This on the heels of tens of thousands coming out for anti-oligarch rallies featuring Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
(2) News leaked that Donald Trump is staging a military parade in the capital nine weeks from now, on June 14. For the first time in our nation’s history, we will have soldiers and tanks flowing through the streets as a display of our president’s might.
(3) The stock market continues its collapse today, the Dow dropping 860 points as I’m writing. The Dow is down 14 percent since Trump took office; 9 percent since Trump’s tariffs were announced.
What do you get when you combine economic calamity, a budding mass protest movement, and the regime’s eagerness to display its mastery of the military on the streets of an American city?
Instability.
That’s a euphemism, of course. “Instability” can take any number of forms, but whatever it looks like, instability can lead to different outcomes.
Because I left out one key factor in that list: Trump has 44 months left to serve in his democratically elected term. Which means that we are locked in here, with this madman.
Let me spin out a few of scenarios for you.
(1) Normalcy. Trump reacts to the feedback the economy is giving him. He undoes the tariffs. He fires the Lutnicks and Hassetts in his administration and brings in some grownups. Having touched the stove, Trump realizes he went too far and tries to course-correct.
I know. I’m laughing, too.
(2) Paralysis. Trump doesn’t want to back down, but congressional Republicans bail in sufficient numbers that it is impossible to pass legislation.
This leads to a budget showdown Trump cannot win. He is forced to give Democrats large-scale concessions. The end result is an administration that is neutered for 17 months leading into the midterms. In 2026, Democrats retake the House and maybe the Senate, too. This further accelerates the Republican revolt. Trump spends the back half of his term trying to hold the ship together and keep his people out of jail.
America white-knuckles it to 2028 and then escapes with only the loss of the American-led world order.1
(3) Rebellion. Some breakaway force within MAGA decides that it can supplant Trump as leader of the movement. It wages an internal campaign against him and pushes him out of office before the end of his term. Maybe they do it through impeachment; maybe the Twenty-fifth Amendment; maybe by giving him a golden parachute.
The new MAGA bosses, led by President JD Vance, attempt to sell the public on the idea that true populist nationalism has never been tried.
(4) Hardening of the autocracy. Trump decides to use the protest movement against him to expand executive power. Someone, somewhere, in the protests does something illegal; Trump uses that as pretext to crack down on it.2
Maybe he employs federal law enforcement. Maybe he uses National Guard units from red states. Maybe he deploys regular military forces.
Whatever shape it comes in, Trump’s control of the levers of power becomes stronger than it is currently. More people are being disappeared off the streets. He inches closer to open defiance of courts. Red states work to tilt the 2026 playing field toward Republican candidates.
There is talk about emergency powers needed to deal with the unrest and the economic damage being created by Trump’s enemies.3
Make your own judgment on the probabilities we should affix to these scenarios.
2. The Constitutional Problem
If we were an actual authoritarian regime, the future would be less uncertain. Either the regime would crush the opposition movement, or the dissidents would overthrow the dictator. The lady or the tiger.
Our problem is that Donald Trump is the duly elected president.
He was voted into office by a plurality while winning a clear majority in the Electoral College.
Yes, he is a felon. Yes, he ran for office promising to break the law. And yes, he is clearly breaking laws left and right.
But as we have discussed, “the law” is a mass delusion. We agree on things called laws. We write them down and codify them. But then a system has to make them corporeal. You need police to investigate law-breaking and a legal system to adjudicate cases, and then another court system on top of that to make sure verdicts are respected.
If those things don’t exist, then written “laws” might as well be poetry.
Our executive branch is currently lawless. By which I mean:
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The Department of Justice has indicated that it will not investigate or charge any members of Trump’s regime with crimes.
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The same Department of Justice has been working itself up to defy court verdicts which the regime finds inconvenient.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that the president may not be charged with criminal law-breaking for any “official” act he takes, full-stop.4
In a very real sense, the law no longer exists for the executive branch.
So here is our problem: The president is no longer bound by law, but he is protected by laws. The same laws that now permit him to, say, instruct Seal Team Six to assassinate the chief justice, also provide for him to complete his presidential term, no matter how many laws—or “laws”—he breaks.
There is only one remedy available. Impeachment.
And that mechanism is a dead letter. It is flatly unthinkable that Congress could remove him from office.
I mean this literally. Try to think up a scenario in which a sufficient number of Republican senators would vote to convict and remove Trump? I can’t do it. Maybe you can.
Where does this all leave us?
Sclerosis.
We are trapped in a constitutional order that no longer functions because the character of the American people has become so degenerated.
We would be better served in this moment by a parliamentary system, in which a vote of no-confidence could remove Trump from office before he had the chance to do more damage. But that option is not available to us. We have the constitutional order we have. And even our ability to modify it by amendment is no longer operable. Because—again—of the degeneracy of the people.
I don’t see a way out, aside from a sudden shock and change in American society.
But maybe you do. If so, I hope you’ll discuss it in the comments.
3. Gender Studies
This piece by Samantha Hancox-Li is hot fire.
The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I’m talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It’s not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I’m just saying what everyone knows. “Hard work and good eating” will only get you so far. And you’ll watch guys who took the “hard work and good eating and mail-order meds” option rocket past you.
If a trans guy tried this we’d call it gender-affirming care.
Witness the bad dreams of the fascist dreamscape. Once-nebbish billionaire Jeff Bezos wanders around Miami roided out of his mind, the woman on his arm plastic-surgeried to the point of parody. Jordan Peterson goes on an all-beef diet until he has a mental and physical breakdown. Mark Zuckerberg wanders around in a baggy t-shirt and gold chain ranting to shareholders about “masculine energy.”
Cock your head and recognize, in the bodies and styles of the reactionary right, the same styles taken from drag culture: exaggerated talismans of masculine and feminine, exaggerated performances of manhood and womanhood, all played with completely straight faces. There’s no humor or fun here, just a dead-eyed desperation to finally be enough.
Read the whole thing. It’s fantastic.
For whatever it’s worth, I view this as the best-case scenario.
If the protest movement continues to expand, then at some point this will happen. When you put tens of thousands of human beings together, they will not all be good people. You will get some bad actors. Maybe they use violence or commit vandalism. Or worse. At which point the government will insist that the entire movement is violent and illegal.
Take that to the bank.
The only question is where public opinion will settle. I’d offer you this analogy:
We all watched January 6th happen, in real time. There was nothing complicated. It was obvious what happened. And after a few weeks, public opinion split basically along partisan lines on whether or not the insurrection was righteous.
Why wouldn’t this happen with an anti-Trump protest movement? My suspicion is that maybe you get a thin majority supporting it. But 55-45 probably isn’t enough to convince an authoritarian that he has to step carefully in dealing with the opposition.
Could Trump convince >45 percent of the country that economic destruction is the fault of evil Europeans, or the Deep State, or DEI, or gypsies, or whatever?
Could he use a recession to increase his level of support, by convincing people they need a strong leader to defeat the shadowy forces who stabbed them in the back?
Maybe; maybe not. This seems like an even-money proposition to me.
Yes, I understand that SCOTUS thinks it has created a test which does put some limits on presidential immunity. The SCOTUS is delusional on this point.
Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
