Our Authoritarian Future
A portent of what's to come
Last week, I wrote about how Democrats should respond to Trump's illegal seizure of power. This week, I thought I'd address the elephant in the room about how Trump will deploy the vast powers at his disposal to specifically target basically anyone who resists his seizure of power.
We should dispense first and foremost with laws and norms. Trump does not care about them and more importantly: they don't bind him. If Trump orders a lackey, for instance, to send a US soldier to sleep in someone’s house, in direct violation of the US Constitution: there is no mythical force out there that is going to protect this mystical right. The lackey will loyally follow the order and the soldier will, out of fear, glee, or disinterest, also follow his orders nine times out of ten.
So what's stopping Trump then? Why is—to name a common Trump foe—Hillary Clinton still roaming free? My best guess is he would rather bluff the Democrats into total capitulation, and failing that, he wants total control over the ladder of escalation. Any Democratic protest will trigger a likewise Trump response, and we've already seen it in threats to prosecute Representatives Omar and Ocasio-Cortez. All they did was post an entirely innocuous thread on how to stand up for your constitutional rights in legal proceedings (stuff like call a lawyer)—which triggered the right to immediately bray for their heads. And these weren’t nobodies: they included actual US prosecutors (and Elon, of course).
This is only the beginning. President’s Day 2025 saw the first true resurgence of the Resistance protest movement (some protested on Inauguration Day but a mass popular movement it was not—most people protesting today appeared to despise Trump all along but were willing, like most Americans polled during the same time, to take a ‘wait-and-see approach’; this protest is real and the masses are most certainly ‘aroused’). And major protest movements don’t come in a vacuum. More Trump outrages will continue to happen, and in a short timespan. Right now, much of America is under a sheen of frost and snow, making protest difficult. What’s going to happen when the ice thaws and summer reigns? My guess, the most obvious guess: massive, unprecedented protests.
It’s here where I’d like to turn to prognostication. Yes, there will be police brutality, but it will be state repression the likes of which we haven’t seen in nearly a century (think the Civil Rights movement), made far the more worse by state technological dominance in the security sector. There will be the obvious displays of power, like always and before: grim black helicopters hovering over dim city lights, jackbooted armored thugs clenching riot shields and batons, throngs of beatings and arrests.
But there will be entirely new horrors as well, ones not even present during even the darkest days of BLM. There will be drones taking pictures of everyone at rallies, and then using AI, finding every protestor, even the ones who take the fullest precautions. Then come the mass arrests. Vans in the middle of the night. Masked nameless soldiers seizing people by the dozens and hundreds every night. In the day, more protest, and they too get swept up in a total, national dragnet, with each new victim fed into a terror machine that processes them in foreign concentration camps in El Salvador, Guantanamo, and beyond. Police will dispense with rubber bullets and more “humane” methods of crowd control and use outright live ammunition and chemical warfare on protestors—they will claim they were acting in self-defense against antifa, but the dead will tell their own tales, especially the women and children.
The media will screech in protest, and they will be destroyed. Trump will order the front doors of the New York Times and all those who oppose him shuttered, the buildings emptied, the servers shut down and employee access revoked. He will do so in direct contradiction of all existing laws and rights including that most sacred of right, that of private property. Who is going to stop him? Who stopped DOGE from illegally seizing control over all federal government departments? At the end of the day: no one. Thus all across America, a long national nightmare will have begun. For each Trump arrest will itself spark more protests, more arrests—until finally the American people have enough and forgo protests and ballots for the bullet. Then: all bets are off. The Great Catastrophe will have begun.
As for the Democrats: they will be pressured mightily, by donors, by their own selfish need to self-preserve their own interests, to capitulate or least bide their time. Except even for the meekest ones, Trump’s actions will force them to react, and thus they are doomed as well. Why? They will have no choice, as hundreds then thousands of their own citizens are rounded up into concentration camps, arrests that they themselves would be complicit in by first helping Trump crack down and then idly standing by as the arrests continue. They’ll sue, but even when courts rule a restraining order, the arrests will continue, the protests will continue. Then: they will finally resist Trump. They’ll start slow, ordering state and local police not to cooperate with Trump. And then: they too will be arrested and marched into a prison camp.
For Trump will have by that point deployed tens of thousands of hostile troops in state capitols and major cities. When the order goes out from Gavin Newsom or whoever’s office to “resist”, the federal government under Trump will respond with merciless force. Nothing will save any of these governors, so immediately outmatched, outgunned, and outmaneuvered by a man who telegraphed exactly what he was going to do, what he was capable of, for months if not years.
My advice to the Democrats remain the same as last week’s. Call Trump’s bluff now. Cut off the federal government from state taxes across the Union now. Deploy state troops loyal to the Union now, don’t wait until Gavin Newsom is being sent to the Gitmo Political Prisoners wing. Do it now! Or perish. It’s that simple. And to speak plainly: you don’t have to be witnesses to history, you can actually have agency in it and take part in it! When the protests start and Trump still hasn’t backed down and agreed to govern normally, then guess what? He can’t arrest you because you’ll surrounded by an already loyal-cadre of troops!
If in six months we are in this situation and Democrats did nothing to prepare or prevent it, you can hum along with me a hearty I-told-you-so as we are led to the mass graves.