Opening the blinds

The story of this summer is in part the story of Trump’s violence and incompetence beginning to turn him from merely an unpopular president to one despised by half or more of the country. Ethnic cleansing in the guise of immigration policy is continuing to alienate more and more people. His lies about the Iran War are exposed every day. In an attempt to soothe his ego, he cannot stop talking about the ballroom, or trying to destroy our federal architectural heritage.

The recent hard turn against him even by some former devotees has as much or more to do with the rising costs of fuel at the pump as it does any newfound embrace of civil and human rights. But we can still make use of his followers’ fury, as we work to alleviate broader suffering and build a better country.

What do people do when faced with incontrovertible evidence that the god emperor at the head of their political movement is a liar, or corrupt. or incompetent? In the end, as the authoritarian’s actions affect more and more of those under his rule, most people—even those who have been completely blind—are forced to choose.

They might finally allow themselves recognize what’s going on, or they might not. Coming to a realization, they might act on it, or they might not. But they know.

Some make their conscious choice early, whether their decision is to walk away from a cult of personality or to cling to the revered leader, even if it triggers estrangement from spouses, friends, and family. Some choose later, when the leader’s ever more ludicrous actions make it impossible for them to ignore the folly of their prior support.

Today, I want to consider that later point—that moment where increasingly ludicrous actions make it impossible for them to ignore what’s happening—because we’re in a significant instance of it right now. I’ll consider the ways public opinion on Trump is shifting, how both institutions and his long-term followers are adapting (or not), and what we can do to encourage the best outcomes through this period of healthy disillusionment.

One key observation about the current crisis is that, unlike similar situations in earlier concentration camp history or other authoritarian states around the globe, people in positions of power are, by and large, not in danger at the moment. Nevertheless, CEO’s, elected officials at every level of government, presidents and boards of universities, and even some judges have caved to Trumpism out of cowardice, corruption, or both—or the belief that they are somehow going to be able to protect their institutions without causing significant damage to them in the meantime. I want to stress this point because one of the most dispiriting aspects of these last two years has been the rapid and utter capitulation by so many who didn’t need to do it.

That said, an important upside and something not to overlook at this moment is that authoritarianism in the U.S. has not yet fully coalesced or completely destroyed democratic institutions. We are well into that chute, and without significant intervention, will soon solidify into competitive authoritarianism ruling over a massive concentration camp system. But several institutions have enough resources remaining to start undoing some of the damage. And the cowardly actors who didn’t stand up and make a difference in the last two years could still do so at little cost to themselves, particularly if people in their orbits put pressure on them.

Unlike so many examples of concentration camp regimes that I’ve explored in the last two years in this newsletter, in the United States today, it’s still possible for nearly all public figures to stand against Trumpism without facing arrest or violence. To the degree that powerful individuals may be at risk for stochastic violence or reprisals from Trump, this is still the optimal time to come forward, because that risk will only increase if Trumpism isn’t stopped now.

The ones who stand up

And the good news is that more and more people are deciding to speak out and stand against the dismantling of the best parts of the country. In some cases, the rejection of Trump is entirely cynical—see for instance the campaign ad from Florida Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar chiding the president on immigration policy. In the same state, Republican candidate for governor Byron Donalds recently removed several references to Trump from his campaign website.

But even cynical rejection hurts Trump. And regular folks are shifting their views and beginning to reject him, too. Of course, there are still farmers who are standing by Trump despite the pain he’s inflicting. But others are not. Some Trump voters are still supporting him, even after ICE harmed their family members. But others have seen it as a bridge too far. During Congressional testimony last week, Donna Ganger—a Trump voter and the mother of Renée Good—testified about the death of her daughter at the hands of an ICE agent last year, and how the loss continues to affect the family.

In other cases, judges are the ones standing up. We’ve been fortunate enough that, as corrupt as the Supreme Court is, several judges in lower courts have continued to work to uphold the best parts of U.S. law. But now we’re seeing a broader shift, in which judges are more often asserting the reality of what is happening on the ground, even to the point of acknowledging the disconnect with reality informing decisions handed down by the Supreme Court itself. This is happening particularly with regard to immigration, as lower court judges begin to set themselves at odds with the abstracted, idealized version of how the violence of “immigration enforcement” is described in court rulings.

I’m thinking particularly of the case of Leonardo Garcia Venegas, which returned to the spotlight again last week. Garcia Venegas is a construction worker and U.S. citizen who has been detained three times, despite showing his STAR ID.

His third time being detained, he was shackled. He told ProPublica, “Honestly, it feels terrible. I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again.”

The judge he made his argument to had heard enough. Last week in Mobile, Alabama, Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey U. Beaverstock ordered a nationwide pause on what the plaintiff described as a warrantless entry policy, a preemptive detention policy and a continued detention policy.

“The government offers no factual support whatsoever as to why officers reasonably believed Venegas ‘may be an alien.’” When the government failed to present supporting records or other evidence, the judge was blunter, saying, “The court is simply not inclined to take the government’s word for it.”

Ex parte Endo

For me, some of the shift we’re seeing from judges and public officials recalls a habeas corpus petition I’ve mentioned before: a court case of Mitsuye Endo, which was brought in response to the campaign against (and detention of) Japanese Americans in U.S. camps during World War II. Endo worked for the state of California and was part of a group of employees who were fired as federal policy and public antipathy stoked anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of Pearl Harbor. (FDR’s February 1942 Executive Order 9066 had opened a door on a process that wound up leading to camps and widespread detention of U.S. citizen and noncitizen immigrants alike.)

The Japanese American Citizens League recruited James Purcell to represent the fired California workers in court, which he did pro bono. Understanding the prejudice that he was up against in the courtroom, Purcell deliberately sought a plaintiff to highlight the bigotry of the government’s actions: a Christian who had been born in the U.S. and never visited Japan, and who had no spoken or written Japanese skills.

Mitsuye Endo fit that bill. Judges wanted badly to be able to assert that they would never justify racism under law, and in Korematsu, the pretended not to be rubber-stamping prejudice. But with Endo, there was literally no excuse that could be made. She endured targeted mistreatment and stonewalling as her case wound its way through the courts over years.

And in the end, she won. Her victory didn’t happen because justices who were willing to deny Fred Korematsu’s rights in his contemporaneous case suddenly pivoted and saw their error. Rather, the justices, faced with Mitsuye Endo, could not conjure the imaginary threat that a majority of them managed to invoke when considering Korematsu’s fate. The decisions in his case (and others) were egregious violations of rights, but it took the Endo petition of habeas corpus to give judges not even a ghost of a gray area in which to excuse racism. They could finally see what they were doing, and were forced to make a decision about it.

Some justices had already understood the errors of judgment rendered by the Court in prior cases. Justice Frank Murphy concurred with the decision in Endo’s petition, but pinned several judgments together for posterity in the statement he added to his concurrence with the decision freeing her:

“I join in the opinion of the Court, but I am of the view that detention in Relocation Centers of persons of Japanese ancestry regardless of loyalty is not only unauthorized by Congress or the Executive but is another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program. As stated more fully in my dissenting opinion in Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States… racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.”

The ones who stay home

History is rarely made by single moments, and is more often changed by inches. During World War II, judges kept ruling the same way until they could no longer find any pretext to do so. Because of the work of so many resisting the camps, the process of ending them was already taking shape, but Endo made that outcome inevitable.

Still, whether we’re talking about then or now, not everyone can be counted on. Not everyone will stand up. There are those who will not be able to publicly accept their own gullibility, or the degree of their complicity in the devastation happening around the world and at home. They may never heal the ruptures they’ve caused in their own families and nationwide.

They will make a worse choice, but this tide that is now turning will still affect them. They will be more uncertain about encouraging a public climate of hatred or obviously partaking in it. They’ll be quieter at the Thanksgiving table and may not ruin the day for everyone else. Five weeks from today, if we’re lucky, they’ll be too demoralized about Trumpism, and will not even vote in the midterms.

Trump’s raging unpopularity will create pressure on an institutional level as well—a pressure to push back against the demands made by Trump and his allies. What should have been understood as the better choice from the beginning will seem less frightening as lame duck status kicks in for a widely loathed president. Universities will begin to downplay the administration’s initiatives that they never believed in but were too cowardly to stand against. And like the humiliated uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, they will at least stop unleashing further harm for the time being.

The ones who embrace hate

Any long-term plan to address where we are now is going to have to tackle the challenge posed by another group of people. I don’t believe it’s a majority of voters, but there are those who find all the mayhem of a Trump presidency worth it, as long as the scapegoats they want punished continue to be mistreated. Long-term cultural shifts and the shoring up of democratic institutions can reduce this percentage in our population. But we shouldn’t pretend that no one actually wants the racism and persecution underway right now.

And that’s true at the highest levels. A number of people who were sentimental about the presidency of George W. Bush have been wondering why he hasn’t publicly condemned Trump and what has happened to the Republican Party.

They got their answer, when coverage of Bush in recent days showed him joining in to support a whole slate of Republican candidates in senate races. The answer is that Bush may or may not like Trump himself—and I doubt he does. But he supports what the Republican Party is doing, because this is what he wants.

His decision is a good reminder that opening the blinds and making the Trump’s malicious folly painfully, exquisitely clear won’t lead to everyone being a better person or making the right choice when they are forced to choose. It won’t protect us in the future from those who are nonetheless willing to embrace the message of hate openly promoted by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller, and the hundreds of elected officials who have ceded their authority to the president. A certain number of people can be reclaimed from encouraging punishment of the most vulnerable in our society and our world, but there will be those who will always embrace hate.

The opportunities the moment provides

In your personal life, you can respond however you want to this massive tide against Trump. You can forgive or not, you can rebuke or humiliate people for the harm they’ve helped do, or not. In this post, I’m more focused on what’s strategic for securing the political and social power to block or dismantle the Trump agenda—or to keep it from returning if and when we do manage to shut it down.

On an institutional level, we absolutely need accountability. Demand investigations at every level, even the community level. Who got contracts to operate in your area, who collaborated with attempts to destroy immigrants’ lives, to roll back support for minority communities, and to crush the independence of colleges and universities?

But given that there’s an election very soon, on the personal level, among those with less power, it’s generally more strategic to let everyone come over to your side who wants to come over. Don’t harangue them for past votes or past mistakes. But at the same time you don’t have to beg or make space for them on bigoted or hateful views.

Let them walk beside you for now, if they want to walk in the same direction. Model the generosity you want them to mirror, without giving ground on extending that same generosity to everyone. And when you wake up on November 4, you can always decide what to do next.

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