If
Reichstag fire.
If they can handcuff a U.S. Senator for asking a question, imagine what they will do to you. pic.twitter.com/cHmK5KZIVF
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 12, 2025
If that’s what they do to a United States Senator with a question, imagine what they can do to any American that dares to speak up. We will hold this administration accountable. pic.twitter.com/ZMExvMmZfE
— Senator Alex Padilla (@SenAlexPadilla) June 12, 2025
We are marching to Senator Thune’s office. There must be accountability for the detainment of a Senator. This is not normal. pic.twitter.com/kupghLfqo1
— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) June 12, 2025
America is dying.
Trump’s agents just physically attacked a U.S. Senator.
This is how freedom dies. https://t.co/pkHuJNjvCj
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 12, 2025
First, they came for the senators…. and it continued on downhill from there.
Their massive and unbelievably rapid escalation of illegal acts has been a winning strategy for them, because it’s unprecedented; in a country previously governed by laws and constrained by mutually accepted norms, nobody knows how to react.
Trump has always warned everyone exactly how he feels he should be allowed to act, and all his opponents thought that he was engaging in hyperbole for dramatic effect, despite being quite capable of seeing that he isn’t intelligent enough. Chamberlain didn’t believe that Hitler would do what he said he was planning to do, either.
Who would have thought that the next Hitler would be an obese and demented elderly American with a fake tan?
There is certainly no shortage of normalization or “sanewashing” – not to mention delusional levels of wishful thinking – going on. I also suspect that the moderate, centrist tendency to “err on the side of least drama” has become such a reflex to a lot of people that any suggestion that things might actually be that bad sounds like obvious “alarmism” and “hysteria” and hence self-refuting.
Still “all his opponents” seems like an exaggeration to me. There are plenty of people out there who never had any illusions about Trump himself. What a lot more people seem to have a hard time fathoming is that a large minority of the American electorate (almost certainly the single largest identifiable “constituency” at the present) really do support Trump’s authoritarian and illiberal agenda and will not start turning against him in droves if only nice liberals and lefties can make them understand how awful he truly is. Sam Harris* once made the point (rightly in my opinion) that because most secularists or moderate believers are unable to imagine what it’s like to really believe the things that religious extremists claim to believe, many can’t bring themselves to accept that anybody else believes it either, hence the obligatory attempts to find secular motives for everything from suicide bombings to the practice of letting your own children die rather than allowing necessary blood transfusions. Apparently any correlation between theses people’s actions and their expressed beliefs was a pure coincidence.
I think the same goes for nice, moderate, centrist liberals and the MAGA crowd. In the summer of 2016 a writer in Der Spiegel argued that Trump was actually a lot closer to the White House than most liberals and leftists were prepared to admit to themselves. In part his argument was based on the observation that, according to the most recent poll results, if you took the rural bias of the electoral system into account, the outcome was basically a coin toss. But the part that really stuck with me was that because liberals and lefties found everything about Trump so repulsive, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that anybody else could find anything to like about him either, hence his “apparent” popular support could only be a great big misunderstanding.
Others, like Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, may not have started out with any particular illusions about the electorate, but underestimated the degree to which the Republican Party had become radicalized. Levitzky and Ziblatt are on record as saying that when they published How Democracies Die in 2018, they saw Trump as a dangerous demagogue with strong anti-democratic tendencies, but they did not see the GOP as an anti-democratic party. They have been forced to revise their opinion on this latter point, however.
Perhaps the hardest lesson to swallow is that he really can get away with anything and that neither the constitution nor the greatly over-hyped system of “checks and balances” is going to stop him. As someone once commented I think most people used to have a vague idea that “they would never let him get away with that”. It’s time to face the fact that there are no such people as “they”, and that no one is coming to the rescue.
*Yes, I know, but as I keep saying, people are not split into those who are right about everything and those who are wrong about everything.
Ya, I think the claim that everyone thought he was just talking smack is way off. It’s been painfully obvious that he would do whatever he could get away with all along.
And that’s still happening. There are still people trying to excuse the voters as having been fooled. I do sort of understand that impulse. It’s rather frightening to think about your neighbors and co-workers as people who support Trump, and like Trump,. and agree with Trump. Sticking heads in the sand is commonplace, especially with people who just want to get on with their lives and not have to work too hard at politics.
There are still people who put the blame on the Democrats. Perhaps the Democrats would have been different if they had anticipated this, but really, it was the Republicans who are the ones who voted for him. The people at fault for this are the Trump voters – as Bjarte said, a sizeable minority but enough to carry an election when joined by those people who are misogynist, those who hated Biden’s trans policies and thought that was reason enough to vote for Trump, those people who don’t like Trump but can’t imagine themselves voting for anyone with a D beside their name, those who are too racist to vote for Harris…the list is long. There were a lot of voters holding their nose to vote for him, but if they are not willing to jump ship, we can’t vote our way out of this. Giving them a reason to vote for a Democrat would essentially undo most of what the Democrats stand for, social and economic progress.
The ones I am most concerned about are the sizeable minority, those who like…even adore…Trump. Where I was living before I retired, that wasn’t a sizeable minority – it was a majority. You heard them in the grocery store, the restaurants (not the coffee houses; those tended to be colonized by liberals), everywhere you went. In Lincoln, it would be easier to get complacent; I live in a neighborhood that was swamped with signs for Harris. We routinely elect Democrats as our city and local leaders. But I lived for most of my life in areas that think Trump is just the cat’s meow, so I don’t accept that people are ‘fooled’ by him. They got what they wanted, and many of them are still cheering him on. The only negative my dad could think of for Trump was that he wouldn’t get on board with the COVID vaccine. My dad’s generation was very vaccine oriented. Otherwise? He was great.
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