The "Trumpenprinzip" Edition

Just how bad will this get? Pretty bad!

So a lot of people are talking in pretty dire terms about what’s going to happen in 2025, and you should believe them.

Democrats and pundits already are talking about how Democrats can make a comeback in 2026 or ‘28. Folks, that just isn’t likely, and it’s not only because pro-democracy forces appear rudderless and demoralized right now. You may as well watch the inauguration on January 20, because it’s the last peaceful transfer of power you’re going to see for a while. Magas did not attempt the violent overthrow of a government just to give up power because the people or a parchment says they should.

They tore down an American flag to replace it with a Trump flag. Never forgive or forget this.

Dictatorships have a wide spectrum, from Hungary to North Korea. In North Korea, obviously you keep a picture of Kim Jong-Un on your wall and wear it on a lapel pin and hear your kids sing paeans to him at school and public festivals, and your whole family will disappear if you even twitch about any of it. That’s unlikely here, though I’m sure Trump would love it.

In Hungary, however, you can stand on a street corner and shout “down with Orban!” with no fear of reprisal—at least not from the police. You might find it hard to get an education or job afterwards, because people know the government won’t look kindly on them for associating with people like you. They—and you—will start having problems with taxes, licenses, property issues, libel suits, the little things that are very important to living in a modern society. But hey, you can always move to some other country in Europe, thanks to the European Union. And that is Viktor Orban’s little secret: he can tolerate you, and rail against the EU, because eventually you’ll leave if you come to hate his Hungary enough, and you’ll still send money home.

Orban also shows an unusual discipline amongst dictators in not seeming to feel the need to use violence as part of maintaining his own ego. He seemingly can tolerate people condemning him with an equanimity other dictators don’t manage. We’ll see if it lasts as he gets older.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t demand you display his picture—though he’d appreciate it—but he also doesn’t have Orban’s maturity and equanimity about dissent. He feels the need to use violence and state coercion to show how powerful he is, and how hopeless and dangerous opposing him would be.

Trump can’t be Kim, but in his lack of discipline he looks a lot more like Putin than Orban. Trump and his supporters won’t be sated by just having and keeping power like Orban; they want blood and imprisonments, and they’re promising it.

Trump’s supporters absolutely believe in the Trumpenprinzip—like the Fuhrerprinzip, the idea that the leader and his will is the ultimate source of authority, unconstrained by laws or institutions—or constitutions. But that’s not going to blend seamlessly into American culture as in North Korea or even Weimar Germany.

The most obvious things that are going to happen in the short term are the things he’s telling us with his appointments:

· Appointing Russell Vought (we’ll talk more about this visionary genius later) as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, as he vows to “traumatize” the Civil Service, tells you they’re totally serious about implementing Project 2025.

INTRODUCING: “2025,” as a Serial Podcast

David Pepper did great work last fall telling the story of P2025 by fictionalizing it in a podcast, with help from some real stars like Mark Ruffalo and Mark Hamill, and some non-Mark stars too;

· Tom Homan as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) already is saying publicly he’s going to lead deportations of entire families, including “anchor baby” U.S. citizens. They’re also talking “de-naturalization” of people they just don’t like. Here’s an important thing to realize: if birthright isn’t the basis of U.S. citizenship, nothing is. The legal basis for any of us to be citizens gets thrown into question. My mom’s WASP family presence here since the 1700s probably covers me, but what if they decide my citizenship is based on my dad’s side, which only arrived circa 1905, and what if 1905 or Irish Catholicism doesn’t meet their cutoff? No one knows what the new basis for citizenship would be, what that means for them, or how that could be changed further if Trump wanted it to be;

· Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard aren’t the people to ensure our national security against foreign threats, but they’re just the people to turn our national security resources against Americans. Hegseth made his name with Trump by advocating for war criminals so awful their own fellow troops turned them in. He absolutely would order American troops to open fire on American civilians.

I could go on, but for MSU purposes Homan and Hegseth are enough to say a lot of people in various U.S. cities should expect to be under de facto martial law soon after Trump’s inauguration. These people want to shoot fellow Americans.

Once the camps are set up for processing migrants for deportation, they won’t go away soon. First, they’re already talking to private companies about running them, so that’s not a revenue stream those companies will want to give up just because, say, Homeland Security already found all the migrants and deported them. It’ll be easier to just pitch into them anyone who can’t prove their citizenship to a cop or soldier at the moment the cop or soldier is annoyed by them—do you carry your passport with you everywhere? “Real” criminal charges won’t be necessary, and in a few days, weeks, or months the government almost certainly will determine that yes, person X is actually a citizen and should be released—but that’s enough time for someone to get the point about their preferred future behavior.

Even in an ideal world where the process is relatively humane, the [citizen] wheat is sorted from the [non-citizen] chaff quickly, and the detained migrants don’t contest their deportation, the camps will fill faster than the inmates can be flown back to their countries of origin. And while some countries won’t put up much fuss at hundreds of their citizens being flown back daily, others—think a hostile country like Venezuela—won’t see any reason to take them back.

So what happens when two or three years pass and some people are still sitting in these camps because their home countries won’t take them back? We’ll have taxpayers unhappy at footing the bill for their care and feeding… many camps being run by for-profit companies… and a significant labor shortage… It’s entirely foreseeable we’ll rent those people right back to the companies that were employing them when we detained them. That is legal slavery under the provisions of the 13^th Amendment.

On top of all this, Trump has promised to fire all of the career Justice Department employees who worked for Jack Smith, and others of his minions are talking about prosecuting “opponents” from Tony Fauci to Alex Vindman to Liz Cheney. So they’re going to go after individuals too.

But we can turn this around by electing Democrats in 2026 and ’28, right?

You’ve probably read the term “free and fair” election in foreign affairs reporting, and diplomats use it all the time. What does it mean? “Free” means the voters can vote; you don’t face obstacles in registering or in appearing to vote, and you can trust your vote will be counted. “Fair” means all the candidates have an equal shot—chances to speak, to advertise, debate, get on the airwaves, etc.—recognizing that the incumbency always has certain inherent advantages.

I’ll predict now that the 2026 election will be as “free” as American elections have been in our lifetimes—recognizing they’ve not been perfect, but certainly are very, very good. Our elections are so devolved it would be very hard to manipulate them at a national level in just two years. Don’t ask me about 2028.

Neither election will be “fair.” You can expect Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to face both legal and extra-legal harassment—imagine tax and electoral-finance investigations, grand juries, low-level violence by extremists who somehow never get caught, investigations into media organizations that give them space and time—just enough to discredit candidates, hobble their campaigns, and intimidate their supporters. If the Feds don’t do it, red state governments will, with no interference from the Feds or the judiciary.

Despite this, Dems might well win back Congress in 2026. It would, after all, be much easier for Maga government to discredit Nancy Pelosi in a way that makes her unelectable than it would be for them to elect a Republican congressperson for San Francisco! But with his talk of recess appointments and overriding the Impoundment Act of 1974, Trump will spend the next two years with an acquiescent Congress and Senate who’ll let him override them and give him all the precedents he needs to justify overriding a Democratic Congress and Senate if/when Democrats take it over in 2027. He might even prefer having a Dem-controlled legislature as a toothless foil he can blame for his own inevitable incompetence, much as Palpatine did with his Imperial Senate opposition for almost 20 years after he declared himself Emperor.

Don’t even try to stop my Star Wars comparisons now!

The big question in 2028 will be what Trump and Maga do, not what Democrat opposes him. That Democrat, by the way, might well be in prison or exile as they try to run. There is no way Magas will give up power in 2028. Again: they already tried a coup. They committed a lot of crimes in their last term in office, and are going to commit more that leave them exposed to prosecution if they leave power again. They will continue to rule into the 2030s unless something outside the constitutional, legal electoral process happens. Accept this now.

Will we have an ugly Trump sneaker on our necks forever? Forever is a long time. The most likely opportunity to end Maga’s Fourth Reich and build a Fifth Republic will come from a transition within Maga, most likely Trump slipping this earthly coil or the people around him finally deciding he’s nuts and needs the 25^th Amendment.

The problem is, none of them can replace Trump. None have whatever it is he’s got that draws voters to him. J.D. Vance has a lot of billionaire money behind him, but not much else. Don Jr. comes closest to having whatever Dad has with the Maga crowd, but no actual political figure respects him. All the rest have more interest in power than an ability to win it. The knife-fighting among them could be literal, and creates the biggest opening for a mass democratic movement to rise from the chaos.

The second possibility of an opening is a military coup or breakdown. Our military personnel are trained to very high ethical standards and a strong belief in our constitutional system. Very few people join the military to serve as domestic riot police. If Maga repression goes on long enough, recruiting and retention will bottom out. Maga will recruit paramilitaries, but working alongside goon squads will alienate professional soldiers even more. At some point, desertions will start. Eventually, somewhere, a unit will mutiny. Others will follow. The risk of violent infighting amongst the security services will grow. Alternately, our military leadership will revolt rather than go to war to conquer allies like Canada or Danish-owned Greenland, who fought and bled alongside us in Afghanistan.

Notice I am not calling for violence! I am simply stating that it’s inevitable given where we are and what Maga promises to do. Violence is part of their plan. That’s no reason for us to do it. Indeed, us pursuing violence would delay the intra-regime security forces struggle, as those troops will stay loyal longer if they have genuine reason to fear violence from us. Trying to accelerate a split in the security forces requires a stronger abjuration of political violence on our parts.

Things probably won’t play out exactly as I describe, but that doesn’t change my key point that looking to electoral politics for an escape from Trumpism in the next decade is likely to be a fruitless exercise. In the best-case scenario, the country is in so much chaos in 2028 that leaderless Magas just shrug hopelessly before a Democratic opponent, because everyone just stopped listening to them a long time ago. But the calamity that has to befall us to get to that point is going to be pretty horrible, and leave a horrible hole for our new leadership to have to climb out of.

So what do we do? I’m still ronin-ing over here! Give me some more time on that.

Good Reads

I think every day is going to be a good day to share the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s “Surveillance Self-Defense” information.

Did the Biden strategy of “deliverism” fail because the concept is poor, or because it didn’t deliver what people really wanted/needed? Sam Stein drills down on trying to understand this, leaning towards “didn’t deliver what people really wanted/needed.” When you’re in dire straits, knowing a new bridge is getting built isn’t much consolation if you’re not directly employed on the bridge.

Jonathan Last has a great take on the bizarre American cognitive bias of believing there are giant mystery groups of minority people out there you’ve never personally seen.

MAGA is explicitly targeting people who research disinformation—because that will make it easier to spread disinformation. We can’t have a functioning country when one party actively builds its strategy around deceiving people.

Kansas City is majority-Black, so of course it’s a major priority of the state’s government to deny them any amount of self-government and to make them pay for their own oppression while starving them of the social services they need and want.

I don’t know if I’m going to adopt it, but I do like Timothy Snyder’s adoption of Trumpmuskovia as the best name for our new Fourth Reich.

I don’t pretend to know what the future of the Democratic Party needs to be. But Perry Bacon, Jr. makes very clear the Dems’ leadership doesn’t know either. Don’t even get me started on the gerontocracy that chooses Gerry Connolly, a 74-year-old congressman with throat cancer, for a leadership position over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a truly generational political talent. That is not the leadership that is going to move us forward.

I hope you’re all having a safe and happy holiday season. I’m on Bluesky and available to chat on Substack as well if you wish to talk or have ideas you want to share.