Trump supporters at the Michigan capitol in 2020. (source)

I’ve been writing this essay for weeks, and events overtake it by the day and sometimes even by the hour. I’d wrapped it up yesterday but then Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that the United States intended to send 1.8 million Palestinians on a new Trail of Tears before we militarily occupy Gaza to rebuild it as an American-owned playground for the idle rich.

Quite obviously, this is one of the most demented and evil things uttered by an American president in quite some time. The mind, quite simply, staggers. Pure madness on all fronts.

This essay is ultimately about political violence and it originally began with the next paragraph, which is vital for you to read and then read again. Let it bang around inside your skull for a bit. Let it marinate. Go ahead:

“The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.”

That was the lede on a New York Times story last week about immediate ripple effects of Donald Trump’s internal coup d’état that seeks to coalesce near-imperial power in the executive branch at the expense of Congress’ primary check against a president’s authority – the purse strings of the federal budget.

Read that quote atop this essay yet again. The formalized cruelty of the Trump administration is staggering. It’s mindlessly stupid and ugly in its utter contempt for human life and for democracy. The HIV drugs are just one of hundreds of examples of the tragic, inhumane effects of the unconstitutional freeze on federal money already allocated by Congress.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo reads.

That sounds like a John Birch Society mailer from 1960. All that’s missing is the classic “Jews, Beatniks, militant feminists, and radical Negro agitators.”

After a federal judge put a temporary stop to it, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget underling withdrew the memo. So the funding was free to be spent, and the life-saving drugs delivered. Or maybe not! Trump’s press secretary said the memo was withdrawn but the freeze was still on. This is how Trumpism works: A flood of confusing vile bullshit, maybe by design to leave critics in an overwhelming quagmire. Or maybe it’s just basic incompetence. Probably a mix of both. Evil and stupid and clumsy and dishonest are hallmarks of MAGA.

The sick, the elderly, the poor, infants and children and desperate mothers, and disabled veterans are all in the crosshairs of Trump’s illegal spending freeze. Trans people, one of the smallest and most vulnerable populations of all, have been made the moral panic scapegoat required for the wider scheme of fascist propaganda to work. Which is not really a surprise because the heart and soul of MAGA is the aforementioned cruelty and persecution of domestic enemies.

This is amid his intentional shitstorm of vile Project 2025-based executive orders that include illegal purges, a flurry of anti-trans diktats that read like Third Reich documents, and a ham-fisted and dishonest effort by neo-Nazi tech billionaire Elon Musk to get almost all 2 million federal employees to take a fake buyout offer that would cripple the government at every level.

And that’s the very obvious goal, to destroy the United States federal government and replace it was a MAGA fever dream of evangelical corporatist techno-fascism, which historian Heather Cox Richardson lays out explicitly in this essay.

Oh, and Trump mandated last week that MAGA-approved mandatory patriotism lessons will be broadcast biweekly into every classroom starting next year. That, dear reader, is grooming and indoctrination to create Trump-Jugend. That executive order came shortly before the air crash tragedy over the Potomac, which Trump and his cronies immediately blamed on non-white minorities and women, because the barely unspoken message of anti-DEI rants is that only white men are qualified to do anything. It’s classic segregationism repackaged for the 21st century. Old wine in new bottles.

Not to be content with his classic weird buffoonery, Trump also cast potential blame for the aerial collision on what he apparently believes are air traffic control towers staffed with dwarves, amputees, epileptics, and the fully paralyzed. No part of that sentence is hyperbole. His words.

On Friday, it was revealed that Musk – unelected, unaccountable, and a sweaty ketamine freak – sent his assistants to seize control of the Office of Personnel Management, gaining access to much of the federal government workforce’s personal information. They locked out senior officials, and Musk has been trying to gain access to the federal government payroll system. He then gained access to the U.S. Treasury, boasting on Sunday of slashing billions of dollars in payments and retweeting treacherous QAnon loon and disgraced ex-general Michael Flynn. With Trump’s approval, Musk closed the U.S. Agency for International Development that since 1961 has provided Congressionally-approved billions of aid dollars globally to eradicate disease and help with natural disasters, famine, and poverty — the country’s major soft-power projection tool intended to bolster democracy.

Trump and his teenage DOGE edgelords now have the personal information of most Americans, and have reportedly plugged outside unsecured and unvetted computers into the federal government’s secure systems.

There’s barely room to mention an astonishingly stupid decision to launch a global trade war, primarily with our closest ally, Canada, and enormous trading partners Mexico and China. And in typical Trump fashion, as soon as global markets began to tumble because of his tariff bullshit, he started to pull back as the damage finally got through his thick, greasy skull. He blinked, but will claim victory. He has “Mission Accomplished” banners for every defeat.

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and from the U.N. Human Rights Council; ended security protections for some of his political enemies that are known to be on hit lists; uselessly opened a California dam far from the L.A. fires; illegally fired dozens of inspectors general watchdogs; shut down government websites and curtailed the ability of agencies to provide the public with critical information; and just before taking office launched an egregiously unethical crypto coin scheme. Oh, and these petty motherfuckers even killed the free federal income tax filing service.

It’s exhausting and is insanity that will fuck over everyone but the ruling class. We face the nation’s most serious internal crisis since the Civil War, and no one has any idea how to fix anything.

To paraphrase Apocalypse Now: The bullshit piles up so fast with Trump that you need wings to stay above it.

Moscow and Beijing and all of the nation’s rivals must be thrilled. America is collapsing upon itself because a minority of people voted for a nasty, senile felon and ex-game show host who also is an Olympic-level blundering bigot that surrounds himself with oligarchs and white nationalists that openly state their desire to cripple the federal government for their own sinister ends. We’re in jeopardy in living under a mutated MAGA version of Peronist Argentina or Francoist Spain, with an apartheid Father Coughlin as co-president.

As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, hell is empty, and all the devils are here. No one is doing much about it, either.

A flurry of lawsuits has the courts temporarily pausing some of Trump’s insanity until the Supreme Court eventually rules on it all, but that corrupt institution has lost its credibility because its conservative justices have been openly and almost comically compromised. We are living in strange, unhappy days and there’s no confidence the high court will rein in Trump’s intentional illegal excesses. After all, they ruled that he has near-imperial powers to carry out the office of the presidency. The court is just as likely to rubber-stamp his actions, giving him his own Enabling Act.

All of which, again, has me thinking about violence. Violence inflicted, violence suffered. Violence as policy, violence as defense.

Right up there with “thoughts and prayers” among our empty and useless official post-tragedy sentiments is the expression “There’s no place for violence in society.”

What balderdash. Hogwash. Nonsense. Twaddle. Violence shouldn’t have a place in society, but it does. A very prominent place. This is a nation founded on violence — the origin of the extremely violent American Revolution is that the colonial ruling and merchant classes didn’t want to pay taxes, which sure sounds familiar — and violence in all forms has been a hallmark of life in this country from birth to death. Which isn’t surprising since the estimate of indigenous people killed by European colonialism of the New World is around 56 million people. America was born in blood.

Today, we’re endlessly policed by increasingly militarized cops in a surveillance state that would shock and sicken George Orwell. That is a type of violence inflicted on our privacy and liberty in the name of safety, yet we’re told we’re always in danger so we must learn to live in a permanent garrison state. Did you know that every laser printer and copy machine since the 1980s has a secret series of embedded dots that makes a sort of watermark on paper so that they can be traced back to the specific machine? Our lives are no longer private, and have not been for a very long time.

The leading cause of death for American children? Guns. They kill more of our children (by murder, suicide, and accidents) than cancer and car crashes. And we are told we cannot do anything about gun violence because the ruling party (and the sycophantic mob of striving hooligans that prop it up) value the nation being awash in firearms more than they care about children.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but it is and always has been and is getting worse. So let us talk about violence, which isn’t always fists or nightsticks or tear gas or water cannons or bayonets or guns. Threats and bullying are violence. Policy is violence. Redlining is violence. My children going through active-shooter drills every year in school is an especially perverse form of emotional violence begat by physical violence. Price-gouging is violence. Exclusion is violence. Government-approved or corporate or societal marginalization and ostracism are forms of violence. Unrestrained crony capitalism requires violence. Policing love and identity is violence.

The Proud Boys freely marching, protected by like-minded cops, to intimidate minorities and LGBTQ people, and Jews, and women? Violence. Erecting statues and naming streets and schools for defeated slavery-defending traitorous Confederate generals is violence. Blocking access to health care and doctors ignoring cries of pain is violence. Letting inner cities rot and under-funding schools is violence. Arming a genocidal rogue state’s campaign of terror is certainly violence. Ignoring or denying climate change as the planet dies is extermination-level violence.

Clearly, not all violence has the same result. A bullet obviously has an immediate and fatal effect much worse to an individual than some shitty MAGA podcaster slinging the N-word at a teenager. But language is violence that inflicts poison and pain and fuels righteous resentment at a deeper level and over a longer time.

The new secretary of defense, an unqualified wino who’ll clearly follow any order from Trump, referred to Fort Liberty the other day by its former name, Fort Bragg. It was renamed under President Biden because it makes no sense to have military bases named for Confederate traitors who led an insurrection against the United States in an effort to preserve human enslavement for the economic and social benefit of the wealthy white Southern planter class, and those striving to join it.

“Fort Bragg” tells millions of Americans: “Fuck you. You are second class, at best. We do not give a shit about how you feel. We value racist treasonists more than we value you.”

But Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want the old Confederate names back. Because they do not understand nor care about what that does and means. They’re white nationalists, and they will insult, demonize, fire, hurt, and kill anyone that stands in their way. That’s why they want to valorize an incompetent dingbat and petty tyrant like Braxton Bragg, whose own troops and fellow generals hated him and who led his army into humiliating defeat. MAGA wants his name back on an Army base because it hurts people they dislike.

We’re ruled by dishonest oafs and brutal meatheads that are intellectually, morally, and ethically bankrupt. These self-styled alpha males thoughtlessly dismiss the notion of non-physical violence as the lazy whining of the weak. They demean the effects of emotional abuse. They cheerlead governmental policy that marginalizes people, and they want the poor to suffer demoralizing bureaucratic nightmares if they seek public aid. Means testing for the poor but not the rich is violence. Handing billionaires tax breaks in decaying cities is violence.

Anyone showing empathy, compassion, and recognizes the humanity of all people is labeled a weak beta male that deserves abuse. That’s the Andrew Tate ethos that animates MAGA. Andrew Kloster, who is Trump’s top lawyer for the Office of Personnel Management (the federal government’s HR agency), is a self-described “raging misogynist” and has said that sexual consent with women is “probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish” and the “slaves owe us reparations.”

That’s the evil knuckle-dragging mindset running America. Rapists, Nazis, fools, crackpots, bullies, cowards, felons, traitors, and grifters. And they all bitch and whimper about their pathetic petty grievances. They’re always the victims.

I know the answer, but I’ll wail the lament regardless: Why must we live and suffer under these viciously stupid landlords? These are sociopaths, which by definition means lacking empathy, compassion, guilt, or remorse. And they’re everywhere, trying to profit from everything and hurt anyone that opposes them.

Worse, American-style banality of evil is also so tacky and proudly ignorant. These are vicious brutes in ill-fitting off-the-rack suits with pick-me concubines that subject themselves to hideous facial disfigurement. It’s a freakshow circus, a shitty knockoff of a Jay Gatsby party, whose center ring Versailles is a gaudy South Florida country club.

In a proper society, these cranks, swindlers, and racists would be rightfully exiled to the powerless fringe, where they would type their weird screeds and print them on basement ditto machines, amid their model train sets and ham radios, and they’d spend their nights stapling and mailing these hateful manifestos to their fellow bigoted kooks. Instead, we get Project 2025 as national policy, deployed by grim battalions of stale white men with small, smooth brains and hate-filled hearts.

And that’s thanks to 49.8 percent of American voters opting for another case of terminal political syphilis instead of Kamala Harris. Voters are not getting cheaper eggs, but they are getting 30,000-bed concentration camps and tariffs and an increasingly totalitarian government. But will there be a wave of buyer’s remorse? We’re seeing some regrets, but I am skeptical because America is a moral sewer flowing with excuses. Monday morning, every red-hatted online MAGA blockhead emerged as a trained economist justifying Trump’s pointless tariffs. The Dunning–Kruger Effect is the Trump administration’s chief export.

I expected Trump, unbound from the establishment guardrails that limited the damage of his first term, to come out of the gate in 2025 as an emboldened amoral asshole, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad so quickly. And it should be said, Trump may be deeply sympathetic to the content of many of these depraved executive orders and unhinged proposals, but he obviously doesn’t fully grasp them or truly give much of a fuck personally about any of this stuff. He’ll sign anything his miserable court of scheming eunuchs put in front of him as long as the cameras are rolling, and the peanut gallery of bigots and vicious ignoramuses cheer him. And that’s how the scheming oligarchs control this inhumane old simpleton.

“The Emperor has immense desires and limited abilities. He wants to do extraordinary things but is only capable of extravagances.” — Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys, 19 century French diplomat referring to Napoleon III

Every goddamn day, Trump keeps signing these things, affixing the signature of the president of the United States on executive orders that make life worse for everyone but the filthy rich that are above this mess anyway. Late Monday, it was confirmed that Trump plans to have Musk gut the Department of Education from the inside because an executive order simply abolishing the agency is beyond any president’s scope. He’s also purging the FBI and other federal agencies of anyone that investigated his obvious crimes. The Justice Department has been remade into his loyal Gestapo-like foot soldiers. Trump and his allies’ openly-stated model is Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian Hungary, and they’re racing with zero pushback to reshape America into something deeply ugly. The Labor Department is up next.

“How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples … small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, 60 and 70 hours with no sleep. …”

Hunter S. Thompson wrote that in his famous 1971 Las Vegas book. How crushingly apt is that paragraph today? He was writing about the unpaid tab for a hotel room wrecked in a three-day booze and drug bender. America itself is now that fucked-up hotel room.

Thompson, a brilliant eccentric and keen observer of America, loved his guns and writing about violence, and himself was beaten by the rioting cops at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That radicalized him. His work after that was filled with the same through-line: Gonzo jeremiads about the death of the American Dream at the hands of vicious, shameless monsters like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Thompson had nothing but contempt for authoritarianism in all forms, as we all should, and spent his career crusading against it.

We can only imagine what Thompson would have had to say about the blatantly high crimes, misdemeanors, corruption, and immorality of Trump and his band of reactionary lackeys and fascist string-pullers. It would have been colorful in its rage. But alas, an ailing Thompson shot himself 20 years ago this month.

His suicide was just more violence. It plagues us, endlessly. It’s inflicted upon us, around us, by them and by ourselves.

Again, we’re constantly told that violence has no place in American society, yet violence bombards each of us in different ways every moment of our lives, even if we’re not always aware of it.

Certainly, the ideal outcome of our present national struggle against the malignancy of Trump II and the MAGA movement is peaceful change at the polls in four years, and Democratic Party and Leftist resistance at every level to impede the worst of their authoritarian impulses until then.

But does that seem likely? Have you seen much resistance since Jan. 20? Much of the federal court system is openly pro-Trump. Congress is controlled by supplicant MAGA senators and representatives, and they’ve proved over and over they’re Trump’s Capitol Hill stormtroopers. Shit, one of them introduced legislation to allow Trump a third term in what looks like a successful ploy to get Trump to call off a federal investigation into his campaign finance crimes. Another Congressional Republican wrote a bill to add Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has been nearly useless in stymying Trump’s blitzkrieg against democracy. Other than a few warriors, there’s been mostly merely low-grade whining about norms and the law and the Constitution, but no broad and unified angry outcry. We did see a few Democrats bring news crews to the USAID headquarters on Monday, and a few on Tuesday came with TV cameras and righteous anger to the Treasury. We need that daily, on TV and online and in print, to demand answers to what Musk’s people are doing with the nation’s money and agencies in secret. We need so much more of that.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House, late Monday issued a broad outline of what the party is working on to combat Trump’s decrees. It’s not much, but it’s a start. And it needs more fangs, and to hurry the fuck up.

Until the Democrats get fighting mad, it appears that Trump could deputize the Proud Boys as U.S. marshals to round them up, and many will meekly walk to their doom in shackles, maybe sending one final text asking for $5 donations.

This is madness. This is lawlessness. And no one is coming to save us.

But there’s no place for violence in American society, we’re told.

Again, that’s clearly untrue but at some point we may have to have the uncomfortable and tragic conversation about when violence *is* necessary to save American society.

If we determine that our nation isn’t worth saving, or we’re too scared and too confused and too busy and too lazy,  maybe we do nothing. We let fascism frog-march America into permanent night. The oligarchs get wealthier and more powerful, and rank and file Americans become sorted more formally into castes, with white men at the top and everyone else reduced into literal serfdom and servitude, with the sole life mission of creating shareholder value. Freedoms of speech and thought are curtailed or eliminated, for the protection and security of Dear Leader and the fatherland and the all-powerful God of Revenue.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” ― George Orwell, “1984“

I like to think most of my fellow citizens do not share Trump’s bleak vision for America. If the Loyal Opposition party is one of mostly dormant norms-bound eunuchs, and mainstream media has become lazy, bad-faith Vichyite collaborationist allies of the administration, then the time will come for common Americans that want to preserve and defend the Constitution and liberal democracy to try more extreme measures.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating violence. I pray to my messy secular gods it never comes to that. But I do believe violence is the legitimate final resort to defend democracy, and it’s disconcerting that a conversation about potential violent revolt against fascism is even in the realm of possible necessity. At some point, the legality of violence against totalitarianism isn’t really a topic of debate. It’s about moral imperative as justification, not legality. Slavery was once legal, too. So was lynching. Protesting those things was not treated as legal or moral.

But holy shit, we cannot let it come to violence.

Why do I not advocate violence if we face such grave peril? For starters, the crisis is still ramping up and can be stopped, and we have other options.

I also have never believed that most people are cut out to own guns, for self defense and especially not for the idea of armed resistance against tyranny. Why? Having guns in a home ratchets up the odds that they’re used in domestic violence, suicide, etc., especially in a nation that suffers from as many mental and emotional health issues as we do. And the decision to use a gun against another person, no matter how justified, is a decision that lasts forever. That Rubicon cannot be uncrossed, and the mental and emotional toll is enormous for most people.

Soldiers are trained to handle justified killing, and even then the toll can be incalculable. Civilians are not soldiers. I hope to hell that civilians are not forced to become soldiers to save our democracy. The Spanish Civil War saw up to a million people die between 1936-39 as that nation’s democracy-loving people futilely struggled to save their republic from fascism.

Violent resistance against our own government, even if it’s a government that’s illegitimate and out of control in its evil madness, would mean pain, suffering, and death on an unimaginable scale. Overwhelming American military force was defeated strategically by the peasant armies of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan at an enormous loss of life and limb, and those peoples and lands are still recovering. The price they paid was gargantuan, with deaths in the millions. But people will pay that price to live as they wish.

The people of Gaza will battle ferociously to not be ethnically cleansed from their homes, even if those homes are rubble, and they’ll fight American soldiers just as they have fought Israelis.

Would American citizens similarly take up arms and sustain pain and suffering to fend off an illegitimate autocratic takeover of their democracy? I cannot stress enough how terrible that would be for people, even in such a just cause. The Civil War’s four years of fighting saw 2 percent of the American population become casualties. Today, that would be nearly 7 million dead and wounded.

Let us explore and exhaust all other options before it comes to open violence. And these must be successful options to avert incomprehensible tragedy, to stave off the Time for Rifles.

Liberals and Leftists began to form something of a Popular Front during the hundred days of the Kamala Harris campaign. Others are more qualified to dissect her failure to beat Trump, but the core of the movement is there. That coalition can be rallied. It must be. The working and middle classes share interests, even if there’s the usual infighting.

If that spirit of cooperation and shared opposition to Trumpist fascism can be harnessed for mass protest and resistance, the idea of America stands a chance. We can trigger the Great National Reset that shocks the system back into the pre-MAGA progress our society was making. We can once again have a rational court system that rejects malignant decisions such as the tragic Citizens United case and restores the Roe protections for women. We can leave people alone to be who they are and to love who they choose. We can right historical wrongs. We can save the Earth.

What gets us there? The Right must be overwhelmed in the political arena, in the courtroom, and in the court of public opinion. It must not be feared. It must be shouted down, told NO, humiliated and punished. It must be held accountable. Fascism must be made shameful and embarrassing again.

Aside from lawsuits, mass national protest is an option. And I immediately acknowledge the Pollyanna optimism required to get millions of Americans protesting in the streets. But I also think MAGA is helping push things that way as it oversteps it popularity and fucks up over and over.

A Harvard study of successful protest movements between 1900 and 2006 showed that motivating 3.5 percent of a nation’s population into protest is the magic number. Today, that’s nearly 12 million Americans. Not impossible, especially as shit continues to fall apart and the federal government begins to fuck over more and more people. The Black Lives Matters rallies were estimated at 50 million but over three years, while the Women’s March in 2017 was said to be 3 million to 5 million on a single day.

Hell, if the Cleveland Cavaliers can get 1.3 million fans into the streets for a championship celebration, America can mobilize 12 million people out of 340 million to save democracy.

What’s so magical about 12 million?

“At that scale, most soldiers have no desire to suppress the protesters. Why? Because the crowd includes their family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors,” an essay about the study reads.

American soldiers don’t sign up as volunteers to kill their fellow citizens. Some certainly will follow any orders – the evil Lt. William Calley of My Lai Massacre infamy was a sympathetic figure after helping slaughter hundreds of old men, women, children, and infants.

It’s still a stark fact that we have high-level elected officials eager to see resistance violently silenced, like Sen. Tom Cotton writing in the New York Times that he wanted the Army to suppress Black Lives Matter protests. Figures great and small in the MAGA Cinematic Universe would clearly be thrilled to see anti-Trump protestors gunned down My Lai style. Everything is risky now, and it’s reasonable to expect that mass peaceful protest and resistance would been seen by Trump and Musk as justification for violent crackdowns, mass arrests, curtailing of civil liberties, and even martial law.

But restoring democracy will never be without risk. And risk brings results. As a teenager in the late Eighties, I watched Eastern Europeans mass protest in their cities by the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands to bring down the Iron Curtain and dissolve, mostly peacefully, decades of authoritarian communist rule. What had been an enormously powerful and sinister force in the world simply crumbled in the face of massive crowds of students, shopkeepers, farmers, office workers, tradesmen, housewives, civil servants, etc.

Beyond marches, we can strike.

In France in particular and in other nations, national strikes have long been effective thanks to organized labor. The Eastern Bloc’s fall began with Poland’s Solidarity trade union forming in 1980 and leading strikes and civil resistance in the face of state suppression. Public and private inconvenience is a huge motivator for politicians that fear the people. Sometimes the official response is violence as police and strikers clash. But often, politicians quickly cave. The American labor movement has been renewed in recent years. Unions will face severe pressure from MAGA trying to roll back labor protections and workplace safety and organizing, but they can lead us out of this nightmare as the organized veterans of strikes and protests.

The United States is one of the largest nations on Earth in both population and physical geography. The idea of a coordinated national strike shutting down the U.S. logistics networks – trucks, aircraft, trains, dock workers – would have an immediate enormous impact. It would cripple the country within days. People would be outraged, but the necessity is to aim that public anger at Trump and his cronies that are responsible for this crisis.

The notion of mass national strikes is daunting. A one-day strike likely isn’t going to have much of an effect. A sustained national work stoppage requires D-Day levels of planning and preparation, and incredible commitment from participants that understand they will suffer financially and potentially face state violence. We’re enslaved by crony corporatist capitalism and its violence, and our credit scores and mortgage/rent payments and ability to keep the lights on and food on the table hangs over most of us. This shit isn’t easy. Hardship is real. The system makes it harder by the day to resist. But resist we must as our options dwindle.

Our fellow citizens will also get mad at us during sweeping strikes. Let’s not forget that the White House and swaths of the public at the time largely blamed the unarmed and peaceful protestors for the Kent State massacre and sympathized with the National Guardsmen that shot into the crowds.

Every time there are uprisings and protests in America, especially when it’s non-white dissent, the usual foot soldiers of The Establishment lecture and howl that protest must be polite, quiet, not cause damage or inconvenience. Which isn’t protest at all. Protest by design must inconvenience, not just politicians and apparatchiks but also our fellow citizens so they also pressure the government to halt injustice.

It’s causing good trouble, as the late John Lewis told us.

There is also the possibility, however remote, that Trump and Musk go so far beyond the pale that senior political leaders, the Joint Chiefs, and the intelligence community are forced to act. That’s a terrible scenario, almost fatally corrosive to the concept of democracy.

When Trump urged his followers to sack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, there was a moment when his cabinet considered deposing him under the 25th Amendment. Another missed opportunity to have rid us of this turbulent menace. I suspect that was the fleeting moment to send Trump to prison forever, but we missed it. There’s little to no chance of that now, even when his excesses get worse. J.D. Vance, the indentured servant that’s ideologically and financially in the thrall of Silicon Valley tech fascists like Peter Thiel, could theoretically lead the cabinet to remove Trump under some diabolical scenario that I lack the vision to imagine. Nuclear war, perhaps? An actual invasion of Gaza? Even then, I doubt it.

No, they will indulge and praise the Mad King.

Unlike Trump’s first term, this cabinet is ultra loyalist and willing to die in the Berlin bunker with him, taking the rest of us with them. The oligarchs will just flee to their elegant underground shelters to wait it out.

We can easily point to moments in history where dictators, despots, and tyrants could have been forcibly removed by the apparatus of government to avoid wider bloodshed. But I do not see that boldness in the DNA of America’s officials and leaders, for better or worse. The Constitutional removal of Trump by his cabinet is an unlikely and bad option, even if a better one than open civil war.

The United States still has not fully recovered from its first Civil War, no matter how justified it was, and the too-early end of Reconstruction. We live daily in that bloody wake, and Trump and MAGA were born from trickle-down white resentment of the Confederacy losing on the battlefield.

We’ve already seen street fights between Trump-supporting masked fascist white nationalist groups and socialist and anarchist anti-fascist groups — echoes of the Weimar Republic — in his first term. We have seen right-wing mass shootings and other violence. The world saw Jan. 6 unfold on live TV, then Trump turned it into a personal celebration and loyalty test.

Americans have struck back violently or in overwhelming shows of strength for just causes in the past with success, immediate or eventual. Lexington and Concord. Harper’s Ferry. Blair Mountain. The Bonus Army. Summer ‘67. Stonewall. Alcatraz. There always have been good Americans willing to risk their lives and freedom to stand up to injustice.

Are we approaching another of those inflection points in history?

I do not see America crumbling into a full civil war on par with 1861-65 unless Trump orders the military to attack civilian protests, and some of the troops and generals refuse such orders. That’s when soldiers begin shooting at each other. Then everything falls apart. Fingers crossed, it never gets that far.

The realistic worst-case scenario is that portions of America fall into a guerilla insurgency not unlike Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80, aka The Troubles. And that’s a fucking nightmare. A truly autocratic Trumpian American will absolutely engender violent resistance.

How did we get here, to these unsavory options and this fear of democratic collapse into darkness? We share a dark, bloody past but we also have shared real progress. We inched forward, messily and violently, as a people.

Now we have far-right Trump ally Jack Posobiec tweeting on Jan. 22: “If you want the Fifties back, you have to repeal the Sixties.”

This is what the cabal of squalid fascists is trying to roll back, any progress. They’re not being coy about it. If you visit the dismal sewers at the edges of the MAGA universe (and they’re closer to the mainstream than you think), you see people directly or closely connected to Trump floating suggestions about repealing the Civil and Voting rights acts (let the states decide how much humanity some people are allowed, like abortion, they say). Ending women’s suffrage, along with ending legality of same-sex and interracial marriage. Repealing labor protections. Deporting Jews or anyone critical of Trump. Mass deportations of refugees and even legal immigrants. Even bringing back slavery.

They’re already trying to erase the Constitution’s 14th Amendment’s extremely clear birthright citizenship guarantee. It’s nauseating, particularly because the limited intellectual sphere on the Right quickly takes such ideas seriously. It’s a grim mob of remorseless, twisted, greedy imbeciles.

And all of that is atop threatened invasions of Canada, Greenland, Panama, and now Gaza. Atop tariffs on our closest allies. Atop telling the Canadian premier that the sovereign nation and NATO member must submit to become the 51st state. Atop a South African that praises Germany’s far-right AfD party and now commandeering the Treasury that pays Social Security. Atop abolishing the FDIC. Atop illegal purges of career civil servant purges. Atop completely halting the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that keeps regular people from being completely fucked by Corporate America.

All of that madness, apart from the invasions, is occurring this very second.

As political commentator Will Stancil noted on Bluesky, the tactic is that the MAGA Right makes things previously unthinkable thinkable. Everything is up for debate. Just asking questions! Or simply becomes rule by decree that no one bothers to challenge. The unthinkable becomes policy.

Good people have to organize to resist such policies. And fast.

The American Right for a generation-plus has made butch noises about “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants” and gave themselves hyper-masculine tattoos and bought guns and tactical gear in preparation for the day they’d have to fight a dictatorial government. The Right has its potential cadres of street-brawling brownshirts and stormtroopers at the ready. Trump released 1,500 more of them recently.

They don’t realize they are the dictatorial government.

Jefferson’s actual quote, written in a letter to a friend in November 1787, is: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

That’s more explicit and means that everyone bleeds in a revolution. The obese militia cosplayers (“MEAL Team Six” and “Semper Pie” and “U.S. Gravy SEALS” and “Delta Forks” and “Green Buffets”) seem to forget or ignore that. People will shoot back if cornered. And who is the tyrant today, a politician that asked you to wear a mask to limit the spread of a plague and to accept the humanity of other people, or the politician that claims imperial power and wants to erase trans children and adults entirely from society while also helping restore measles and polio?

Yet it’s not just individuals that are in MAGA’s crosshairs.

The Republican Party for decades billed itself as the party of small government, that would free business from profit-strangling regulations like child labor laws and environmental protections. But now we have Reuters reporting that 19 attorneys general — you can guess their political affiliation — pressuring Costco to abandon its diversity efforts. Fucking Costco!

Why would the “party of small government” threaten private business?

Racism. Sometimes it’s that simple. It’s the squalid, sordid moral cancer rotting America’s soul since its founding. Now it’s publicly amok again.

Trump’s second victory has unleashed a typhoon of malicious forces into the open to infect American life, putting a fresh stamp of government approval on stale bigotry. The sweeping anti-DEI efforts are simply modern resegregation. The mass deportation of brown people is fetishized within MAGA. Racism and appeals to racist beliefs and fears have successfully animated American conservatism since the Southern Strategy of the Sixties saw the GOP realign politically to warmly welcome the Dixiecrats and Klan. It’s no mystery why the core national Republican electoral map today looks much like a map of the Confederacy, and why you see Confederate flags at Trump rallies. One of his Jan. 6 treasonists was photographed carrying such a flag inside the Capitol. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee must have been smiling in hell at that.

Trump’s success at the ballot box is the Confederacy’s revenge. The Klan’s retaliation. The John Birch Society’s retribution. George Lincoln Rockwell’s vengeance. The mob’s payback. Wall Street’s wrath.

So what will drive millions into the streets in angry revulsion at all of this? The Super Bowl being canceled? Streaming services going offline? TikTok being banned? Sports gambling outages? Empty grocery store shelves? Mass unemployment? Neighbors being hauled away to camps?

I suspect it’ll take unchecked inflation plus loss of basic services such as utilities and medical care, along with high unemployment, food lines, and travel restrictions. The loss of basic freedoms that affect rank and file MAGA voters, too. Even then, it will likely require a major inciting incident like federal agents or the Army gunning down protestors, i.e. a Kent State at a mass scale. The bread and circuses today are more powerful tools than any Roman emperor could have imagined. But people eventually push back. Tyrants always fall.

Maybe the Gaza stuff is Trump’s Operation Barbarossa, his fatal overreach that finally drains him of conservative support before he can even mount such an invasion and occupation. The evangelical MAGA base isn’t interested in paying to build houses for homeless Americans much less Palestinian Muslims. Fighting an insurgency that would rival Iraq and Afghanistan and South Vietnam doesn’t put America first, as their stupid little hats say. But MAGA also is a cult of personality that has no shame in doing a 180 on policy and ideology to support anything Trump suggests. So who the fuck knows. Maybe, as some insist, the Trump administration is actually just weak men who will shrink and surrender if they have to confront true resistance and accountability. Maybe.

It’s depressing to have to think about such things. To think of protests and strikes and violence. But we must think while we still can.

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