I’ll admit that during the first Trump administration I was disappointed in his ability to get elected, but figured he wouldn’t get much accomplished due to our institutions. There’s still two and a half years left of Trump 2.0 and I’m terrified about what we could have at the end of it–if it even ends.
We’re in the middle of a rolling coup. That’s not hyperbole. It’s not being dramatic. It’s not Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s the truth. It has been carefully planned and is being systematically executed to slowly destroy institutions that have been meant to protect our Democracy. Any other explanation is from someone with their head in the sand.
From the article:
On September 25, 2025, the president signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”). Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway.
and
…he is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports, and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter rolls and ballots.
and
Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADS).
We’re all frogs slowly boiling in ultra conservative, christo-fascism water and probably much closer to that boiling point that the vast majority of us realize. Scary times.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he answered.
I’m not so sure we have the political will or want to keep it anymore.