Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
We’re in deep trouble and there doesn’t seem to be anything anybody can do about it. Our rights, our way of life, and our democracy are under attack from within. Armed soldiers are patrolling the streets of our greatest cities, U.S. citizens are being arrested, detained, and deported without due process. Illegal and egregiously partisan gerrymandering is taking place in Texas and possibly other states, putting our free and fair elections at risk. This sounds more like the internal power struggles of a third-world country, but no… this is today’s America. Donald Trump’s America. Ten years ago, all of this would have been unthinkable. But here we are.
In the eight months since then Trump’s inauguration, we’ve watched him tear down humanitarian funding, destroy government agencies, kidnap, torture, and deport our fellow citizens, occupy our cities with American armed forces, and—almost unbelievably—much, much more. Authoritarianism is not coming. It’s here. And no one has been able to stop it. Legally.
Donald Trump is not doing this all by himself. He’s hardly capable of masterminding such a far-reaching and comprehensive plot to undermine our government institutions, electoral process, and our economy. No, this conspiracy goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s new conservatism. Elements of it—white supremacy and Christian nationalism especially—have roots in Reconstruction, but the origins of this cancer on our democracy is not the point anymore. Survival is.
So, what can we do—at this late hour—to preserve our democracy? We’re facing armed soldiers—Americans—in our own streets. Our voting rights are being stripped away from us before our very eyes. Our Congress and Supreme Court have been hijacked by far-right conservatives. What are we left with?
Well, the voice of the people for one. Millions of citizens have participated in thousands of protests over the past eight months, pushing back against cuts to Medicaid, DIH, USAID, the VA, Social Security, the Department of Education, and many, many others. The president’s approval ratings and poll numbers have dropped to historic lows in nearly every significant category. He has lost—if he ever had it—the trust of the American people, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him. He doesn’t believe in elections, either. He seems to think he can stay in the White House without them.
Donald Trump is a man who does not respect the law, does not believe in the law, and who does not follow the law. He is a convicted felon thirty-four times over. Lower courts have ruled against his enablement of DOGE, their rampant attacks on our governmental institutions, including the subsequent firing of thousands of federal employees, but President Trump, for the most part, has defied or ignored these rulings.
He also has the Supreme Court (or at least two-thirds of it) in his back pocket, thanks to decades of selectively padding the court with conservatives. After giving him nearly unlimited immunity in the landmark Trump v. United States case in July 2024, they have nearly always ruled in his favor. They have allowed his executive orders terminating NIH funding to stand, have allowed administrative firings of federal officers to stand, and vacated lower-court injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. They (two-thirds of them) are definitely in his corner.
The part of the Republican majority in Congress that is not enthralled or beholden to him is so afraid of Trump, they cannot stand up to his draconian policies that are hurting their own constituents. Those who have gone to face their people in town hall meetings have been shouted down, heckled, and reviled. In the handful of special elections that have taken place in the months since Trump took office, for the most part, Republican candidates have been beaten soundly. Yet they lie under the president’s thumb, squirming like lab rats.
And some state politicians, like the Texas Republican majority, are complicit with this attempted authoritarian takeover. They are actively working to rig the election in Trump’s—and their own favor—by the most outrageous and egregious case of gerrymandering in the nation’s history.
So, except for lower federal courts, some state government officials, and millions of pissed-off voters, Donald Trump appears to be running the table. He has the FBI, the Department of Justice, ICE, Congress, and the Supreme Court in his pocket. He is attempting (mostly successfully) to intimidate universities, media giants, and corporate giants to do his bidding, and he is doing it with the blessing of the Christian Nationalists, one-percenters like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, white supremacists, QAnon crazies, climate change deniers, and every other worm that has crawled out of the woodwork.
Is Trump’s victory inevitable? Will this charlatan, this snake-oil salesman, this second-rate TV celebrity bring down what was once the world’s greatest democracy? Will he become a king, a fuerher, a tsar, a tin god? It’s not looking good for the average American. Yet, historically, we have seen worse. As laid out in Rachel Maddow’s gripping book, Prequel,the American government was threatened by fascist forces from within once before—and we won.
Today, besides our court systems, it is the states that are holding the fort. Governors Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois have been pushing back against Trump’s power grabs. Governor Newsom has sued the president and has signed the ”Election Rigging Response Act” that will redistrict California voting districts to lean democratic in order to counteract the Republican advantage from the gerrymandering in Texas. Newsom has also been actively trolling the president on social media, mocking Trump’s bombastic tweeting style.
Upon hearing that President Trump was planning on sending troops to Chicago in order to establish order, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois gathered together Mayor , assorted representatives, clergy, and all other city officials to address the possible armed incursion into Chicago. During his passionate and eloguent address, he accused the president of deliberately “searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.” He also told the president Chicago did not want or need him to maintain law and order there. He also reminded the people of Chicago that protests should always remain non-violent.
The president will probably not honor the governor’s wishes. He doesn’t seem capable of understanding anyone else’s needs other than his own—which seem to be as vacuous and huge as the vacuum of outer space.
What will happen if he plows ahead and occupies our great cities—usually Democratic strongholds? What will happen if National Guardsmen or ICE thugs start intimidating voters at the polls or instituting martial law rigging our once free and fair elections and packing our Capitol Building full of soulless lackeys? What will we do then? Will there be civil war? Or will the free states of Europe—with Canada and Mexico—unite to vanquish the forces of fascism in the United States of America (a surreal reversal of historical World War II alliances)? Will the next D-Day invasion come into American through Toronto, Ottawa, or Tijuana?
Or will the people, a la the French Revolution or the American War of Independence, rise up in anger?
Who knows? While this is not strictly new territory for all of us (see Prequel), never before has a sitting U.S president set his sights of making himself King of America—and never before has he had such a massive infrastructure behind him. One thing is sure. We must resist this hateful power mongering at every turn. We are Americans. He fooled us once. Shame on him. Then he fooled us twice. Shame on us. We must reclaim our honor, dignity, principles, and humanity. We must stand and fight.