Shut them down, round them up

Today, I want to look at how Trump and his allies screwed up their opening strategy for trying to end democracy as we know it when they assumed power last year. With a mostly supine Congress and a Supreme Court showing near-continuous deference, they’ve managed to do a shocking amount of harm since January 2025. But they got one thing—what may turn out to be the most important thing—wrong.

After Donald Trump was first elected back in 2016, administration officials arrived guns blazing to block Muslims from entering the country while also aiming to get as many immigrants—or at least the brown-skinned ones—out of the country as soon as they could try to force the issue.

Resistance was quick out of the gate. And with many of those working for the president looking to build institutional power for themselves or for the Republican Party, some key officials in the administration, as well as the courts, didn’t always buy Trump’s loose-cannon approach. More importantly, everyday Americans found the family separation policy especially revolting.

The second time Trump ran, he did so specifically and openly on bellicose racism and foreigner-bashing, spreading calumny about refugees and lashing out at Haitians in particular. The “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” placards at the Republican National Convention will go down in history for their horrific support of ethnic purging.

Although he just squeaked by, he pretended he’d won in a landslide. And when he returned to the presidency in January 2025, he took government by storm, smashing and dismantling much of the functioning federal apparatus, while seeking vastly more funding for armed forces loyal to him, with a special emphasis on injecting more violence into immigration enforcement.

They started a secret-police effort run like a brutal but clumsy military crackdown on immigrants nationwide. Trump and his allies either thought that they’d already intimidated their opposition, that they could shut dissent down easily if arose, or that not enough people would care to make a difference. They found out that none of the three were true.

Trump’s team got out over their skis by trying to do a massive expansion of concentration camps to detain targeted groups before shutting down their political opposition. They’ve since found that approach can’t succeed in the country at this time.

So today, I’ll address where we’re at now and why it’s the most dangerous moment for the country in decades. Trump’s allies are trying to course correct to clamp down on dissent as they run out of time to make sure Trumpist violence against Americans and the current attempt to undo civil rights achievements and human rights in the U.S. won’t end in 2028 or with Trump’s death.

I’ve been saying for more than a year that the administration has overshot what it can get away with for now. Entrenching concentration camps in a society in such a way that they can do an end run around the legal system usually involves opponents and scapegoats. Authoritarians are able to rise to power by using propaganda relentlessly against the scapegoats they’ve targeted, but their main obstacle to staying in power is their political opposition.

Sometimes they crush the opposition immediately before coming to power or as a means to seize it—such as in a coup. Just as often, they suppress dissent soon after taking power. But traditionally, they have to end the broad ability to publicly dissent in order to establish the ability to round up people at will for any extended period of time.

By the time Trump camp back to power in 2025, the U.S. had, on the whole (not you, the reader now reading this essay, but the larger population), long ago learned to accept government roundups of a group of people who were removed from society. It was already acceptable to target immigrants for violence.

So last year, Trump’s team charged ahead and upped the ante, turning targeted arrests into mass operations to terrorize immigrant communities outside churches, in hospitals, and even going after those who were showing up for court-mandated hearings. Masked men seized adults, pregnant women, and children alike, sometimes arresting even citizens with identifying documents.

But this approach was unusual in the context of concentration camp history. Outside a coup or an immediate collapse into civil war after an authoritarian seizure of power, when a country wants to present itself as the continuity of steadiness and law-abiding authority, the era of street sweeps in broad daylight tends to take place after an initial period of entrenchment.

As I’ve said in posts before, even the Nazis took five years before launching mass arrests of German Jews that targeted whole communities. They spent the first two years of the Third Reich solidifying their political power, establishing a dictatorship, making laws aimed at turning the Jewish population into illegal aliens, and sending their political opposition into exile, camps, or an early grave.

Upon seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks likewise had to establish military control of Russia—which in their case happened through civil war. They would then spend years after that war’s end demolishing their political opposition before the Gulag could be fully established, capable of detaining anyone they wanted it to.

Mercenaries and caliper-wielders

All of this is not to suggest that the Trump administration has ignored dissent entirely in the year and a half since January 2025. They’ve tried to address it through haphazard cases against protesters that would make it clear that those who registered their objections to mass roundups, the denial of due process, and concentration camps for immigrants would wind up targeted, too. But officials seemed to think they could make terrorizing immigrants and mass detention on the basis of ethnicity their main focus while conducting more of a drive-by attack on those speaking up about ICE detention.

How did they come to adopt this reversed flowchart of oppression? I think it was in part because of the perceived strength of First Amendment rights in the U.S. and the degree to which they are seen as part of national identity, and in part because the Republicans have a split camp. The second Trump administration includes an amoral conman grifter class and profoundly racist white supremacists.

To be clear, my sense is that several officials belong to both categories, including the president himself. But at the next level down from Trump, one identity or the other tends to dominate. As an ideologue, Stephen Miller’s focus is the racial and ethnic purging of the country. In contrast, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are both mercenaries without any real ideology. They seem more interested in accumulating massive amounts of political power—the long-term authoritarian project.

For both groups, the end vision is similar, but how to get there is different. While they seek to maximize political power, the mercenaries often encourage using legal tools and couching their more violent ambitions. The true believers say exactly what they mean, ready to spend their political capital today despite risks, foaming at the mouth and leaning directly into the violence of their project.

On arrival in January 2025, the ideologues won control of how to focus White House priorities. Think of the key role of not just Miller but also Gregory Bovino, the chief Border Patrol agent who led and encouraged so much violence in Chicago and Minneapolis before being pushed out.

Anatomy of a resistance

But resistance was too steep and quick in the face of the ideologues’ operations for everything to go smoothly. Shootings and assassinations of U.S. citizens on the street as part of a deliberately violent project carried out by immigration enforcement agents shocked the country, and public opinion shifted quickly. When pressure came to expedite the expansion of detention by coopting existing warehouses, everyday people also pushed back tremendously against the plan to put the next Dachau in their backyards. (Note, however, that this is not a dead project; it has just been repeatedly stalled and made tremendously messy by public awareness and organizing.)

In addition, lower-level courts have been backing immigrants’ rights in many cases, demanding due process. And in the wake of brutal policies, not to mention the economic effects of an inane war launched on Iran, Donald Trump has also become phenomenally unpopular—which further fuels dissent. As a result, the ideologues have lost some of their control over setting the agenda for the Trump administration.

The White House has been forced to recalibrate, understanding that the administration moved too quickly, or perhaps thinking that political victory meant a majority of U.S. citizens were behind their platform of hate and violence. They seem to be realizing that they overshot their mark and have to switch gears ahead of the election.

To be clear, Trump has been wanting to prosecute people from the beginning. And his minions have obliged. Remember, Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka was arrestedT at Delaney Hall more than a year ago. Then there’s the Broadview Six in Chicago, who were charged over a September demonstration. Then of course there’s Sean Dunn, the sandwich-throwing guy from last August.

With Dunn, the prosecution’s actions were neither reasonable nor strategic. Even bringing the case made the government look like idiots, and didn’t help them at all going forward. There are no brigades of people throwing sandwiches.

But most of the other prosecutions were likewise too ambitious. Ras Baraka’s case was quickly dismissed. Later, all the charges against the Broadview Six were dropped. Trump is trying hard, but he hasn’t yet sealed a dictatorship that will let him jail political opponents who are elected officials over free speech.

The grimmer side

Nevertheless, some other attempts at prosecution launched in the same window have been more targeted, more successful, and more dangerous. New Jersey Representative Lamonica McIver was in court on appeal just last week, trying to get an assault charge against her over her actions last year at the Delaney Hall ICE camp thrown out. Three Spokane protesters alleged to have blocked a bus transferring immigrant detainees were convicted of conspiracy by a jury and are awaiting sentencing, with possible jail terms of up to six years and fines of a quarter-million dollars.

When some protesters at the Prairieland ICE Detention Camp in Texas resorted to vandalism last year, one fired a weapon after a policeman drew a gun. They and others who’d been in attendance—including at least some individuals who left the scene early, when ordered to disperse—were charged with material support for terrorism over their production of political zines. Extraordinary sentences of 30 to 100 hundred years were handed down last week, by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who is said to have written that he wanted to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

Targeting those who make zines is a much greater threat than going after those who make a public statement by throwing sandwiches. Working to use the law to link nonviolent protesters to those who commit violence and then giving them long jail terms is a much more strategic approach to suppressing dissent. Sympathetic judges handing down maximum sentences along with lectures seeming to encourage the eradication of free speech are a danger to democracy. I expect we will see more of all this—even as other judges simultaneously denounce the unraveling of the Constitution.

A different kind of campaign

We’re currently seeing a broader attempt at intimidation as well. Trump has launched a campaign against the supposed saboteurs of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, claiming several citations and arrests have taken place. It seems clear that the bulk—and perhaps the entirety—of the damage to the pool was inflicted by the contractor hired by Trump.

Earlier this week, we learned about David Streever, a father who appears to have been effectively stalked by the FBI as they tracked him down at a hotel over an angry letter he sent in January—one that apparently didn’t make any threats. In Minnesota, poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea found herself ordered to take down a five-month-old Instagram post criticizing the killing of Renee Good and naming the shooter.

To be clear, when I talk about this shift in emphasis toward public intimidation of protesters by the federal government, I’m not talking about something entirely coordinated. It’s likely partly intentional—as with the removal of Bovino. But the shift also comes—as it does sometimes for prosecutors—when early efforts fail. And it’s also true that authoritarian systems develop their own momentum as they manage to further degrade democracy and coalesce.

We’ve seen an example of the latter with censorship increasing in the U.S. Major news institutions, one after the other, have been bought and gutted, or diminished by owners who pay fealty to Trump. More and more people get their news from social media, which is also predominantly owned by Trump allies and backers. Algorithms downplay or suppress political or anti-administration content. And at legacy outlets, stories honestly describing what’s happening in the country are harder and harder to get produced or printed.

Going forward

As we approach the midterms, I expect to see a more aggressive assault on free speech overall—and particularly charges tied to physical presence at demonstrations and protests. Those who want to stand up for their rights will need to be even more careful about protecting themselves and one another.

My sense is that, in the midst of war and rising economic crisis, it’s too late for Trump and his allies to correct their early unleashing of their ideologues by being more strategic and mercenary. They’ve already given away the game about what they’re up to—and they’re revealing themselves as incompetent in new ways every day. But that doesn’t mean they won’t do tremendous damage while they can.

None of what I’ve written above today means we can assume they’ll fail. It just means that that the possibility of success exists for us, if we continue to resist.

The administration’s best hope for continuing their gruesome atrocities and campaign against everyday people years into the future is to shut down dissent before November. So these next four months are likely to reveal even more desperate moves from Trump’s allies. It’s critical that the opposition keep pushing back on these illegal power grabs.

This week, the Supreme Court didn’t give Trump everything he wanted, but it did expand his authority over several agencies. Yet even with the slack they are giving him to work with, much of what the president is doing is still illegal. The corruption continues to expand daily.

Keep resisting letting all this become normal. Show up for one another. Give to legal defense funds, such as the one for the 15 anti-ICE organizers recently arrested in Minneapolis. Pressure your elected officials to speak on behalf of those detained, whether they’re immigrants, protesters, or both. Support publications that cover the rising oppression via real shoe-leather reporting about daily events: who’s getting arrested, who’s getting charged, and who’s getting detained. Speak out with friends and family, at public hearings, online and in person, and at demonstrations to show that the right to do so is not negotiable and will not be surrendered.

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