Trump’s grip is not as tight as he thinks it is

On the night immediately following ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, my sleep was disturbed by visions of the ensuing protests around the country exploding into an “American Spring.” In Washington, D.C., where I live, I saw a vast rising of demonstrators besiege the White House, then overrun the place. The president and his key advisers fled the compound by helicopter, and a mob ransacked the abandoned executive mansion and the adjacent executive office buildings.

Lesser White House staffers fled into tunnels beneath the White House complex and tried to slip away into the city. Not all escaped, however. Some were cornered and beaten. In the general chaos, deaths occurred on both sides. For many hours, Trump’s whereabouts were unclear, but then it emerged that he had flown to a U.S. Navy ship in the Atlantic and eventually retreated to Florida and the gilded fastness of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County. He was guarded there by various elements of federal security agencies and by a cordon comprising thousands of the most die-hard MAGA faithful.

In the capital city, the mob was gleeful, but the event was a tragedy. Our country had walked the path of Sri Lanka, Egypt, Tunisia, the Philippines, Bolivia, Honduras and many other countries in the Americas and beyond whose leaders had so outraged their populations that those leaders had to flee the people to save their own skins.

There was a time when I could not dream to countenance such developments in the United States of America. Our country was different. Manifestly different. But on Jan. 6, 2021, everything changed.

On that day, Congress, acting in a constitutionally mandated exercise, was meeting in a joint session to conduct the pro forma task of certifying the electoral college results that established Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump, the incumbent and soon-to-depart president, had urged his supporters across the country to assemble in Washington on that day. On what was then known as Twitter, Trump declared: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

On the appointed day, Trump hosted a rally on the Ellipse at the south side of the White House. Although at one point he urged the enormous crowd to act peacefully, his words in their totality were highly aggressive and provocative. “And if you don’t fight like a hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore,” he said near the end of a fiery speech, which also featured the recently minted lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Then he told the crowd that “we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue — I love Pennsylvania Avenue — and we’re going to the Capitol … and we’re going to try and give our Republicans — the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So, let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The “pride and boldness” that the Republicans in Congress needed, in Trump’s mind, was the will to interfere unconstitutionally with the certification of Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

The crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue as a “they” rather than as a “we,” since Trump was not among his supporters for that procession (apparently having been diverted by the Secret Service), and laid siege to the United States Capitol. Trump’s supporters ultimately forced their way into the place and rampaged through it in a display that disgusted all decent Americans and shocked much of the rest of the world. From that disgraceful episode several deaths resulted, including that of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot by a police officer as she tried to climb through a breach in a locked door well inside the Capitol.

When I heard Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump and Vice President JD Vance justify last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis as an act of self-defense by ICE agent Ross, my mind inevitably ran back to the shooting of Babbitt inside the U.S. Capitol building, which she had penetrated deeply as part of a violent criminal mob. Since her death, Republicans have lionized her as a martyr, casting her as the faultless victim of a murderous police officer. The second Trump administration even agreed to a nearly $5 million settlement in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Babbitt’s family.

I suppose the same will happen for Renee Good under the next Democratic president. If it does, it will not necessarily be a good thing, merely evidence of a further hardening of the “us” and “them” division in the country. The right looks after its own when it has state power, and the left looks after its own when state power swings back into its hands. Tribal politics.

And this brings me back to Donald Trump and his behavior as president. The posture of Trump and his administration has been deeply offensive to the values to which this country has long clung — even though too often the country has viewed those values too lofty or inconvenient to be honored. At home and abroad, the attitude of Trump and his administration is broadly adversarial. Trump’s malignant personality has reshaped all of government to project the idea that if anyone objects to what Trump wants, what Trump wants will be obtained anyway — by threat, by corrupt use of state organs such as the Justice Department or by naked force. And because Trump is fundamentally dishonest, discerning his motives in many situations is like unpicking the Gordian Knot.

Thus we have the supposed peacemaker president invading Venezuela and seizing its fraudulent leader Nicolás Maduro in an exercise of thug vs. thug. But what is the real reason? Is it to use Venezuela’s heavy crude oil, which the U.S. does have the capacity to refine, to prevent a fuel-price shock here at home when Trump decides to topple the Iranian theocracy in the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Remember that the Sunni kingdom has urged the U.S. in the past “to cut off the head of the snake” that is Shiite Iran because of Tehran’s feared nuclear activity.) Trump, for various reasons, is eager to please both Riyadh and Jerusalem. And both would rejoice at a defanging of Tehran. But rare is the plan that survives contact with the stresses of reality.

Then there is Ukraine. There, we have our supposed peacemaker president claiming to be working to end the war of aggression that Russia started by invading its neighbor, but Trump, in the same breath, is threatening to acquire Denmark’s Greenland territory using exactly the method by which Russia’s Vladimir Putin seeks to obtain eastern Ukraine: violent and illegal seizure.

I have a theory about this Greenland campaign: For Trump and his white-supremacist cabal, the contiguous parts of the U.S. have become frighteningly polluted with brown and black people. One solution is to obtain a territory in Europe to establish a racial Eden, an elite destination for white people only, and even then only white people of suitable ideological purity. After all, in the eyes of white supemacists, a “woke” white person is as undesirable as a black or brown person. The 50,000 or so Inuit people of Greenland would not constitute a problem. After all, neither did Native Americans, who were eliminated or displaced and corralled as European Americans pursued their “manifest destiny” in westward expansion here.

The effort to take Greenland threatens to sever the U.S. from its NATO security partners and from its commercial and civilizational partners in the European Union. It raises the prospect of NATO’s European members, and perhaps NATO member Canada here in North America, rallying to defend Denmark and Greenland militarily against the aggression of fellow NATO member the United States. That would be the end of NATO as constituted and purposed since its formation after World War II. Trump would shed no tears over a breakup of NATO, and Putin would be delighted by it.

Here I return to a theme that I continue to hammer: white supremacy. I believe that Trump sees a Russia with Putin’s values as a necessary partner to a U.S. with Trump’s values in a global, fascist, white-supremacist axis. That axis encompasses Europe’s entire far-right white-purity enterprise stretching from the United Kingdom in the west to the farthest eastern reaches of Russia. And, of course, it includes the supposedly imperiled and dispossessed Boers of South Africa.

The surge in worldwide migration that has come with economic globalization has triggered pushback in countries around the world, but the rejection of the migrant outsider — often a dark-skinned Muslim — has been especially harsh in Europe. That is the tune that Donald Trump sings, demonizing brown-skinned migrants in the U.S. as polluting American blood and society with the ways and values of their “shithole countries” while he pines for the U.S. to attract more Scandinavians as immigrants.

If Trump is burning through the U.S.’s goodwill abroad with hostility and a bizarre tariff policy targeting even long-standing friends, for most Americans he has absolutely no personal goodwill to spend here at home. Trump and his administration are deeply despised across this country, and the hatred is growing. Even elements of his notoriously faithful base are beginning to question their religion. More and more of his base sees him as governing not for the people’s interest but for his people’s interest. Most Americans simply want him gone — whether by impeachment and eventual imprisonment or by illness or death of natural causes. They are sick of his chaos, his bloated and festering ego, his divisiveness.

Increasingly, Americans are appalled at Trump’s misuse of the Department of Justice to persecute his political enemies or any significant figure who stands in his way. This is a man who claimed that the Biden Justice Department had been weaponized against him, but nothing that happened under Biden compares to the excesses of the Trump Justice Department. (In my view, the prosecution of Trump by the Biden Justice Department was entirely right and proper.) Trump has fired U.S. attorneys (whom he himself appointed) because their judgment led them to defy his desires and has improperly substituted handpicked stooges who have gone on to be disqualified or to see their partisan prosecutions rebuffed by grand juries and federal judges. Trump’s Justice Department is has become the very word he used to describe those countries he so profanely dismissed.

After instigating government legal action against Letitia James, Lisa Cook, John Bolton and James Comey, Trump has now sicced his eager-beaver Justice Department head Pam Bondi on the Federal Reserve because he wants to get rid of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. In less than one year in office for a second term, Trump has corrupted the Department of Justice more deeply than I think most Americans could have imagined could happen.

And now we have an aggressive expansion of two federal police forces: Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Customs and Border Protection. It occurs to me that most of the people becoming law enforcement officers in these two agencies today under Donald Trump may be of a mindset like Trump’s: aggressively racist. After all, they must know what team they are joining. And they will get to go hunting throughout the country while masked. These two police agencies worry me inordinately. They appear to me to have the ubiquity and the mindset to be Trump’s own Geheime Staatspolizei in this do-or-die mid-term election year. My fear is that Trump will try to use them and the National Guard somehow to interfere with the conduct of this year’s elections.

If you think I am having a fever dream, think back to the inconceivable events that came to pass with such ease Jan. 6, 2021. Think of what you know of Donald Trump and his most ardent abettors, the likes of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Think of the entire architecture of right-wing white supremacy in this country. None of it has gone away. It waits in the wings to emerge as it did for Jan. 6.

But Trump is not in a strong position. He stands in dire peril, in fact, because with each hand he is holding an unhappy wolf by one ear. One beast is the hound of global alienation, and the other canid is domestic fury over Trump’s crass self-indulgence and his autocratic style of governance. Americans keep telling him that they want no king, and he keeps pressing ahead with what resembles a personal imperial project. He appears to believe that he is safe behind the Secret Service and all the other federal and local law enforcement agencies in Washington. But history shows us repeatedly that when public discontent with a leader reaches a critical mass and the crowds march, even the modern Praetorian Guard melts away and the tyrant falls.

The inconceivable violation that Trump abetted on Jan. 6, 2021, may yet come back to visit him in the very house where he lives.