Our Real-World Worst-Case Scenario
Donald Trump is acting like he wants to provoke a conflagration to serve as a pretext for a seizure of dictatorial power
Sorry, no audio version of this post from me today. In the aftermath of the Big Move, my whole family has come down with colds. If I tried to record this post, the result would be unlistenable, with coughs and sniffles causing constant interruptions to the flow of words. I trust I’ll be feel better enough to record an audio file for my next post toward the end of the week.
The Linker family move, which led me to pause posting here over the past two weeks, is finally complete.
What did I miss?
Just kidding. I may have been utterly swamped with packing and then unpacking what seemed like 60,000 boxes, but I still managed to keep up on the news. There’s been a lot of it, including a war between Israel and Iran, and Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington D.C., which some saw as the leading edge of North-Korea-style tyranny but which turned out to be a sparsely attended big nothing of an event.
By far the most ominous thing to occur over the last couple of weeks, from my standpoint, was the outbreak of sometimes violent protests in Los Angeles in response to stepped-up ICE raids in the city, and the president’s reaction to that violence, which was to federalize the California national guard, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and then to send a full Marine battalion (around 700 soldiers) into the city to restore and maintain order.
Regular readers know that this is a scenario I’ve sketched out a number of times, here and in a long piece I wrote for Persuasion shortly before the 2024 election, as the shortest and most direct path to dictatorship for the Trump administration. The scenario goes like this: Looting and riots break out in response to provocatively harsh moves against immigrants; the administration “sends in the troops” to restore order; violence by protesters intensifies, leading to the activation of more troops. Eventually, Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, which gives the president sweeping and open-ended powers. As the militant left adopts harsher tactics against the forces Trump has deployed, the crackdown becomes more severe, eventually culminating in the de facto imposition of martial law in a series of American cities.
A week ago, when protesters flying Mexican and Palestinian flags began burning cars and looting stores in LA, and Trump made his first moves to deploy the military in response, I thought my nightmare scenario might be unfolding before our eyes. That the events of last week were set to be followed by Trump’s military parade on Saturday and a series of “No Kings” counterprotests around the country the same day only increased my anxiety. Could this be it—a pretext that enables the president to seize dictatorial powers and strangle America’s already buckling liberal democracy?
The answer, at the moment, would seem to be no—or at least not yet.
It’s worth thinking through why events haven’t unfolded in that way, and what would have to take place for the threat to return and unfold along darker and more dangerous lines.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from the Middleground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.