Swept into the flood

It turns out that tragedy and farce are not mutually exclusive. With this week’s election, America has chosen to Groundhog Day its future through a past it can’t yet shake.

We’re face to face again with not just Trump but the peril of what he promises to do, and what an election will deliver to him. With all the talk of detention and deportation, I want to look at some parallels between today and the past, to see what they can tell us about what comes next, and to address what civilians can typically do in the face of the most likely threats.

This will be a long post, so pace yourself and digest it in pieces if you need to.

Across the last century, demagogues worldwide have managed to acquire power through a variety of entry points: after election or appointment, by seizing control in a violent coup, by shifting from a quasi-conventional leader into a full-blown authoritarian one, or via some combination of the above.

Each path to power brings with it certain limitations and opportunities once the strongman begins exerting both legal and extralegal power. The setting for Trump's return to office borrows a little from each past authoritarian strain. And each one tells us a little bit about what could happen next in the U.S.

Three historical cases

The first category listed above—those who came to power through conventional mechanisms used legally or after bending the law—would include Adolf Hitler being appointed chancellor in January 1933 after the Nazi strength shown in multiple elections the previous year. The Nazis began brutalizing their political opponents immediately, and within weeks, were setting up ad hoc concentration camps. But Hitler's role as dictator would not be fully entrenched until the death of President Paul von Hindenburg.

Five years of propaganda and legislation stripping German Jews of citizenship and rights would take place before the Nazis began rounding them up en masse to detain them in concentration camps, including a stint where Germany worked hard to host the 1936 Olympics and make everyday life appear to outsiders as if nothing were amiss.

An example of the second case—of seizing power through violent means—would be Chilean generals triggering a coup starting with using jets to bomb La Moneda, the office of the president, deposing the elected government in September 1973. Confident in the support of the U.S., they immediately began rounding up and detaining thousands of political opponents. Only after outcry around the globe did they have to dial the public violence back a little. It would take an assassination on U.S. soil by Chilean secret police in 1976 to create real pressure from Washington against the government to tamp down the worst abuses. Yet Pinochet would remain in power until 1990.

The third case would cover leaders like Vladimir Putin—who surrendered the presidency of Russia (though not his control of the country) in 2008 after two terms, as required by law, before returning to assume dictatorial powers. Given that he was a KGB agent early in his career, it's no surprise that he committed abuses from his first years as President. But it was after his return to power that he abandoned the economic reforms he'd once encouraged, massively expanded the Russian national guard to suppress political protests, ramped up his elimination of political opponents by assassination or imprisonment, seized Crimea, and launched a decade of war in Ukraine.

How these historical examples apply today

Trump’s return has some similarity to each case. On Tuesday, he won the race for an office that U.S. courts should have disqualified him from after his role in spurring the January 6 insurrection. Hitler had tried to seize power years before, too, and had even gone to jail. But laws were stretched to give him access as a candidate before his appointment. Trump will likewise enter office with more legitimacy, because he outright won office after laws were ignored to make him a candidate. The system is now in place to deliver him more power than any president has ever wielded.

As for the Chilean case, Trump will not have to seize power in a coup, as the generals did. But his rhetoric and planning for his agenda after his January 2025 inauguration are framed as if he's overthrowing the existing limits on the presidency and the government itself—as if his January 6, 2020 coup has finally succeeded.

Trump has mused about a third term, which is unconstitutional, and has repeated a frequently made promise to end birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

He has threatened to unleash the National Guard on immigrants, with Stephen Miller suggesting that where governors (who control the guard within each state) resist, troops could be sent from a Trump-supporting state into the unfriendly state against the will of the people and governor there: “You’re going to go in an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland.”

Trump has threatened special prosecutor Jack Smith with deportation, and said that criminal charges should be brought against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, journalists, Hunter Biden, and countless others he believes have unfairly opposed him. What he will be able to accomplish is an open question, but he’s openly announcing plans to establish police powers and upend the constitution—the language of coups.

Like Putin in the third example, Trump is returning to an office he left without ever really giving up control of his party. And his party is so thoroughly cowed that he can try to implement his plans without concessions to them. There are several House races yet to be decided, but the Republicans are currently likely to hold the trifecta of power for the American government.

Under these conditions, how does history suggest that his power might be furthered or constrained? Realistically, it appears that, like Putin, he will be more aggressively authoritarian than he was during his first stint in office. He’s already promised to be a dictator on day one. He will be less concerned with stocking his advisors and cabinets with people who will appease anyone in the Republican Party—he effectively is the Republican Party, and he has defeated those inside it who opposed him.

As for the Chilean case, a coup makes a show of force quickly and violently to demonstrate control and discourage opposition. There is little question at this point whether Trump will assume the presidency in January. But everything about how he's framing his arrival is presented as if he still needs to unleash widespread violence and punishment.

The list of enemies he’s threatening to punish and the need to show he can do physical harm to vulnerable groups and to any protections offered by other branches of government are bad signs. They suggest he's gunning for powers beyond those held by prior presidents and aims to subvert our current system of government.

As for the German example, Trump will enter office a second time with more power than Hitler had in his first months. Meanwhile, a Supreme Court unwilling to rein him in has effectively given him carte blanche for unlawful acts.

It's possible that he will act so egregiously that it will shock the country enough to make the Court respond, but he already has a bedrock of public support for mass deportations. It's what he ran on. And a national propaganda system has already captured his supporters and remains dedicated to any agenda he chooses. He’s starting out on third base in terms of mobilizing the potential for repression.

With so much talk of mass deportations, I think it’s helpful to look at examples of foreign countries that have endured (and sometimes embraced) authoritarians or concentration camps. Sometimes it’s easier to understand a situation you can look at from the perspective of an outsider.

But make no mistake, the U.S. already has its own history with these kinds of camps. And remember that most Japanese Americans rounded up and detained during World War II were American citizens, stripped of the rights of citizenship by the president, with the tiptoeing approval of the Supreme Court.

In addition, the kind of repression Trump is threatening other groups with is very much the kind of reactionary use of police powers in the segregated South and elsewhere in America, then and even after desegregation. It’s important to recognize the preexisting domestic variant of what has likewise happened around the world.

A little good news

The biggest news in America’s favor is that rarely in history does something like this happen in such a way that those who would oppose the despot have more than two months to plan and prepare. That is a precious gift. People who want to make a difference or put up roadblocks can use that time wisely to build networks and prepare. There still time to get over grief and being stunned and to act.

The second piece of good news is that Trump at this point doesn’t have control over the military (recall his earlier alleged whining about wanting generals like Hitler’s). This is extremely unusual when dealing with a wannabe tyrant.

While various parts of domestic and border law enforcement are already fully backing him, and while there are surely Trump fans and extremists at every rank in every branch, the U.S. military is built to move slowly, to respect walls that have been established for a long time about the use of force domestically, and to resist overtly political activity.

It will take time to break that down across the board, and he may not be able to do it quickly enough to hinder future elections.

The third piece of good news is that elected officials are preemptively standing up against Trump’s plans, announcing that they will refuse to help carry out his illegitimate deportation effort. Among them are Governor Maura Healy of Massachusetts, Attorney General Letitia James in New York, and Governor JB Pritzker in Illinois.

This kind of regional and local resistance will be very difficult to continue for any extended period, especially if federal funds are withheld. But it will be critical for as long as it lasts.

Fourth, we still have a partially functioning court system and a massive bureaucracy that currently helps a lot of people in this country. They will face destructive forces and be used to do harm, but it will take time to dismantle that bureaucracy and to circumvent or replace more independent judges. Disruption of the bureaucracy that helps a huge percentage of the population will be the hardest thing to get House Republicans to go along with, because representatives will lose their seats in two years if benefits are substantially interrupted. In the meantime, people will still get help, and some courts will still stall or slow down the worst of Trump’s plans.

The fifth piece of good news is that the Trump team isn’t actually very smart. Selling hate and ignorance is easy. Smashing things is easy. Instilling fear is easy. Using a playbook of hatemongers and infinite money from billionaires to poison people's minds is easy.

Many of the people running things and appointed to carry out tasks will be incompetent. In addition, the interests of the billionaires is sometimes going to conflict with the goals of those who want to wreck the economy through tariffs and deportations. There will be infighting, they will bungle things—sometimes in ways that do additional harm, but more often in ways that trip them up.

Given this mixed picture, let's look at what Trump has said he'll do. I want to consider four key issues, and then move on to what people can do to help, if anyone is interested in thoughts on that.

Immigration

Trump plans to exercise power maximally against immigrants. Though the show target is undocumented immigrants, he and key advisors have also threatened to harm many other immigrant groups.

There will be a deportation blitz and it’s likely to begin in January 2025. Traditionally the courts would be the best way to hamstring aggressive new immigration crackdowns, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that judges can’t restrain even unlawful immigration enforcement programs, which will torpedo the kind of use of the judicial system that had been a first line of defense against executive action in the past.

Several states, rather than protecting immigrants, have signed on to do additional harm by taking matters into their own hands via more aggressive measures. So far, however, the court system has barred states from enforcing these laws.

Trump allies have said they will conduct a massive deportation project, but looking at the numbers under Obama and Trump, Obama did far more in this arena than Trump in his first term—largely because his administration preferentially targeted those who had recently arrived or those who had been convicted of a serious crime, groups that were easier to deport in the existing system. Trump, on the other hand, targeted everyone at once and locked the system up, accomplishing far less toward his goal.

The incoming administration will be looking to expand who can be deported or detained while slated for deportation. In addition to Trump’s talk about stripping legal status from immigrants who currently have temporary protections, Stephen Miller has talked about turbocharging attempts begun in the last Trump administration to denaturalize people who have already received citizenship. Trump has suggested protesters could be targeted for deportation. Eliminating birthright citizenship will likely be a heavier lift.

Even if the incoming administration breaks more laws (or makes new ones), their sloppy approach and the scale on which they will be attempting to work will lead to detention backlogs. Private detention companies were saying this week that there will be delays of weeks or months, which will require a rapid expansion of holding facilities. Stephen Miller has described Trump planning large-scale holding grounds, likely in Texas.

Aside from the issue of warehousing humans in transit camps, getting them out of the country will be a real challenge. While some countries can be intimidated or leveraged, deportations will be very difficult to force on unwilling nations.

This will result in an ad hoc mass civilian detention system, which is how most concentration camp systems start. Looking back at punitive detention used at some point for immigrants by nearly every president in my lifetime, it possible to see how the seeds were planted and tended over time to let this become such a wedge issue, providing the infrastructure that will be the base for Trump’s plans when he returns to office.

There will be a worsening of the spectacle of deliberate cruelty of the kind we saw with family separations during Trump's earlier time in office. In my opinion, this spectacle will be more focused on terrorizing immigrant populations and establishing a sense of unstoppable power than reaching any particular goal. But it will unleash mayhem and harm vast numbers of people.

Hitler's biggest initial goal for Jews before coming to power was to make them aliens, stateless immigrants with no rights inside Germany, so that he could force them out or do what he wanted to them. Trump is starting out with his target population already largely a pariah class in the country, so those who are currently undocumented are immediately tremendously vulnerable and will become more so.

Other groups will likely be swept up in these arrests but they will take longer to fold in on a larger scale, and there will be more ways to resist those actions.

Abortion

Reproductive rights are one area in which the federal government could easily do more harm very quickly, because it’s off to a running start already. After the fall of Roe, the administrative state quickly shifted to persecute pregnant women on a wider basis.

The use of the Comstock Act to shut down a huge percentage of medical abortions is a real threat, and the Supreme Court has other harms it may yet inflict in this arena. Extremists like JD Vance seem prepared to push for more travel restrictions and fertility monitoring.

What we know is that there will still be abortions, they will just be less safe. And that women who have no access to safe care will die in greater numbers. Prosecutions over miscarriage will be used strategically to control women, and all this will likely occur inside the existing judicial system rather than in any extrajudicial improvised camp setting.

The abortion rights community has a long, effective history of working to help women get the health care they need. It will be indispensable going forward, even as the challenges it will face loom much larger.

Trans rights

Abortion and the issues around trans rights go hand in hand, because in both cases, there’s a veneer of protecting women or children laid over policies that are really about denying people bodily autonomy.

While some states have staved off legislation, others have succumbed to this hatefest. (You can find a trans legislation tracker here.) People will continue to be trans, of course, but getting care will become more difficult, and impossible for some. People may be frightened into detransitioning. Expect a spectacle to be made of these cases from the people who stoked an anti-trans moral panic.

Trans people have been at the forefront of a lot of local and national work to guarantee human rights to everyone. But as a small population that has been very effectively demonized, they will likely need active, ongoing support from people willing to let them take the lead on figuring out what needs to be done next to best protect their community.

Climate

Climate change is both more immediate and more abstract than some of the issues I’ve considered above. More immediate, because the crisis is already in motion and a good amount of damage done that it is already too late to undo. The issue is also more abstract, in that people seem capable of infinite denial with anything that happens on such a vast scale (see also, Covid).

The incoming Trump administration will do a lot of damage in this arena, because taking action across these next four years really is vital to preserving a set of more livable conditions on the planet. The good news is that state and regional efforts can still have an impact, which will mitigate some of that harm.

Most heartening is that the cost of renewable energy is on its way to ending dependence on fossil fuels. States that stick with wind and solar will profit. Companies are realizing they can make money off green energy, which means people who care about the environment may find themselves in partnership with some strange bedfellows in the next four years, setting different Trump allies at odds with one other, and possibly providing an avenue to jam the administration’s dedication to fossil fuels. It’s not clear it will shift administration policies that Trump seemed willing to change to suit to the highest bidder during his campaign, but it’s likely to create infighting in good ways that might reduce harm.

How we survive this mess

(Feel free to skip this part if you don’t want advice.)

You really don't have to invent the wheel, and you’ll usually do more harm if you try to. While actions like protest can be critical to assuring civil rights long term, they can also be gamed by governments itching to create a bloody photo op to intimidate the opposition. Stick with groups that have experience organizing, and get training. The level of planning and structure from the Jim Crow era is a shining example of how this approach works.

On the public level, it’s important to keep pressure on elected officials. Support the ones who are already working on what matters to you and who can make a difference. Those include national and state representatives who are standing up for a reality-based politics and protecting the vulnerable, whether they are your reps or not. Legislators are also often aware of what is happening in their corner of the world and can help constituents find networks of community support.

There are a lot of ways official channels will still be useful. Elected leaders can pressure for-profit detention facilities and the contractors that staff them. Local officials can help to make sure that hotels and civic venues like sports stadiums, conference centers, and warehouses will not be tapped to offer impromptu detention, as has happened so often across history when camp systems are implemented or expanded.

Trump’s immigration plans will take enormous amounts of money to inflict on the country. Neither the Senate nor the House will have a comfortable majority to cut the programs that will need to be cut to make mass deportations happen on a vast scale for an extended period.

There will be opportunities in these places of tension and conflict. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, the Reichstag in Germany defunded a genocide its military was committing in South-West Africa against the Herero and Nama people. Governing bodies can be tools for harm but also for good, especially when legislators self-interest is also at stake.

Inside your community

Community organizations outside official structure are as important, if not more so. Assess your strengths and what issue or issues matter most to you, and focus on a limited set of goals. As Georgetown University professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote this week, "Care widely, act selectively."

Contact local, county, and state community organizations on those issues to see what they're doing, and how you can plug into that. If there's a gap in their resources that you can fill, make suggestions but be patient. People might need to see how you work within their setup before they deputize you to do something totally new. More likely, some group somewhere is already crying out for your skill set.

Here are a few ideas about how to use your time and/or money into on the issues I’ve mentioned, or at least to get ideas for next steps. To help support immigrants’ rights, there are so many needs, from pro-bono lawyers and interpreters to HIAS’s work with refugees and those seeking asylum. There are even online directories that can help you narrow your choices down. You may want to enter “findhelp.org: immigrant rights” into your search bar to get started.

To focus on abortion rights, see this guide from Jezebel, with a stunning array of options. To support trans rights, see this listing of groups around the country. To address the climate crisis, you can keep harassing your elected officials, but also work to make a difference locally by looking for groups near you like NYC’s WE ACT, which fights to mobilize low-income communities of color around pollution and environmental health in northern Manhattan.

But there are a million other ways to contribute, from fighting book bans to supporting your local library or running for your school board. Pick an area that matters to you and which complements your skill set, where the work itself is likely to keep you motivated.

Authoritarians aim to destroy the social fabric and to isolate individuals. Anything you do to counter that is good work. We may or may not see heroes in our time, but we can be sure that the most vital work will done on a smaller scale day in and day out by regular people.

At a personal level

Use these two months to make safety plans. Is your driver’s license expiring soon? Renew it. Is your passport valid? Do you and your family members or chosen family have vaccinations? Wills? If you have health care now, get preventive tests or procedures done now, while your coverage is solid. Remove any future obstacles you can think of now.

Whether or not you choose do anything that’s actually outside the law, you may end up in trouble with the authorities at some point. If you had to leave your apartment or home for a time, where could you go to be safe? Think of someplace not far away, and a place in another state, and if you have the means, someplace in another country. What would you take with you? What sanctuary or help could you provide for others in that situation?

You don’t have to have a perfect idea what to do. But it’s always good to have a plan for different levels of emergency, even if it’s just a few days of staying with a friend or family member you won’t endanger by visiting.

Online support is one area in which our information society has advantages to go with its disadvantages. We can show support for targeted people in ways that at its worst can be empty virtue signaling, but which can also be an important beacon to people around us that others care about them and might be willing to help.

It’s easy to be furious at everyone today, but be cautious about judging others. Someone who withdraws socially may have a trans kid they’re not telling you about, or an undocumented relative they’re protecting. It’s fine to reach out to people to check in, if you’re worried about them. But if you’re able to do a lot in the community and others aren’t, you may have no idea why they’re not or what they’re doing on the side.

With trans rights and abortion, we’ve seen the rise of something that has long been a feature of totalitarian societies: the snitch state, as Adam Serwer recently dubbed it. Medical professionals or neighbors or loved ones or people with a grudge have knowledge of vulnerable groups and rat them out.

This will become more and more common. Stalwart institutions will start to crumble and may even step in to aid repressive measures, as we saw universities do across the last year.

History shows to be careful about who knows your personal business. Don’t post a heartfelt story on Facebook about your next-door neighbor’s trans kid in a way that would make them identifiable.

The level of surveillance available to the government today is staggering. If this is news to you, consider using Signal for anything political or personal matters that might make you vulnerable. (If it’s not news to you, you already know what to do.)

How we get out of this mess

It's perfectly legitimate to condemn Trump supporters who have delivered the country to this disaster. Keeping a clear head about what actually happened is critical to staying sane and keeping moving.

But condemning Trump voters is insufficient. The ability of the right-wing disinformation sphere to recast the meta conversation for a large part of the population is how we got to this place. That has been true again and again in countries where authoritarians have gain power.

The way to undo it for most of us is to work on the grass-roots level to create or rebuild interconnected communities. Learning to work outside your personal silo will be incredibly important.

For those of us who come from a background where we were raised with disinformation and the harm that comes from a Trumpist worldview inside our households, it can be hard and even destabilizing to deliberately connect to new people with those views.

To people who didn't come from that background but who are actively victimized by it—the direct targets of Trumpist bigotry—it can be even harder to imagine engaging. Whether they ever choose to or not, my feeling is that the burden lies primarily on other people to do this work.

The only way out is to build bigger, stronger communities. Where possible, we have to connect to people not yet swallowed by propaganda but who are at risk of falling prey to it.

The really heroic work is to bring people back from disinformation. But that is hard, hard stuff, and not quickly done, and is often less productive than building connections with other groups. Demanding heroism from yourself or others is unreasonable. Go with the kind of productive engagement that you can stomach, because all of it can make a real difference.

Underlying issues

I’m not a political scientist, but my sense is that what we need is a return to the fairness doctrine, a purge of dark money from politics, and a higher tax bracket for billionaires. The culture wars are only the means by which moneyed interests make use of our societal vulnerabilities to preserve their power.

It seems to me that what we are most at risk of repeating long term—what is well on its way to already existing—is the South American dictatorships from the second half of the twentieth century. Vast income inequality has been a feature, not a bug, in our country for several decades now. Societal structures heavily favors the interests of the wealthy and punitive law enforcement to keep everything in place. The U.S. helped to install and maintain these systems of governance for decades, but its citizens are now captured by the same dynamic our country nurtured abroad.

No wonder people feel cut off from governance, even as the Biden administration spectacularly navigated the economy wrecked by Covid, avoiding almost certain recession. The connection between Obama and Obamacare, the connection between Biden and the good things happening at the local level due to the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act—it all gets lost, whether through deliberate obfuscation by opponents, or due to grave missteps by the administration on other fronts. Government is easily portrayed as a source of only bad things and often shoots itself in the foot in explaining what it’s doing.

I can say more definitively that history shows us propaganda works. There is always a group in a given country or region against whom popular opinion can be turned, given enough time. In mid-twentieth century Europe, it was the Jews and Roma and Sinti people. In Myanmar when I was there a decade ago, it was (and is) the Rohingya. In the US, the biggest scapegoats have been those whose land or labor could be taken without reprisal, who also happen to be those to whom we've historically denied citizenship: Native Americans, enslaved people, immigrants.

The metaphor of addiction can be a useful way to think about our situation. You can legitimately be infuriated because a family member stole your laptop and sold it for drugs, or got in hock to a loan shark they can't pay back. You might even cut them off, and they would deserve it.

While a certain number of Trump supporters are enthusiastic about harming vulnerable people, it’s worth remembering that there are others in there with them who don’t realize what’s coming. The latter group are addicted to living inside a world of disinformation—which gives them something missing from their lives. It’s possible to see them as both responsible for their actions and captured by something bigger than themselves.

Which is not to say that you should spend all, or even any, of your energy on them. But keeping others from falling into the same hole will be key to building and sustaining a democracy.

Focus on what you can do

So if you begin to feel a sense of helplessness, shift to an area where you can do something. Agency is a process. People who stand for the issues they care about will win sometimes. And where we aren’t successful, failure will bring unforeseen opportunities in other arenas.

Guerilla warfare is composed of a million small acts to slow the ruling power through attrition. People have survived and lived whole lives under far worse conditions than most of us will ever face. Millions have been focused on the election, but there are so many areas in which we can act that don’t require the complete defeat of Trumpism writ large to make a real difference for ourselves and others now at risk.

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