We will not give Trump what he wants most

On November 5th, we round the corner on the anniversary of the worst turn in American history in, at least, my lifetime.

Naturally, this is a moment to take a sober look at where we are. In short, it’s awful. Miserable. Nearly “unbearable,” as Kundera might say.

But Tuesday's overwhelming rejection of Trumpism at the polls reminds us that our plight isn’t as horrible as Donald Trump wants it, or needs it, to be. With victories everywhere from Georgia to Maine to Pennsylvania to Virginia to New Jersey to California, the light at the end of the tunnel has flashed into our sight.

And what we see there is ourselves.

What we have to crawl out of

The victories will spike our courage and alter the government's path on the ground in many places. But the fundamental crisis of authoritarianism has not gone away. And the victories will likely only increase the regime's urgency to act before traditional checks on its power threaten to stand in its way.

The election of Donald Trump for a second term has turned out to be as bad or worse in every way I could have possibly imagined, save that I was sure we’d have abandoned Ukraine and NATO even more thoroughly by now.

The president of the United States breaking the law and defying courts to starve 42 million Americans—as he builds a gold wedding venue for himself in place of the East Wing of the White House—represents the least of the kinds of horrors I expected. His slow conditioning of our military into lawless, lethal strikes on civilians by trying to start an illegal war in our hemisphere borders on worse than I’d hoped for. While the assault of Chicago is pretty much everything I’d feared made real.

The New York Times Editorial Board is different from the paper’s political desk, though often bad in the same ways. But they displayed clear insight into what this Trump regime would bring us last October.

And on the last day of this October, the same board took a look at the reality of this regime’s first nine months, and they got some help.

“The Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon.”

Their conclusion, for now:

The United States is not an autocracy today. It still has a mostly free press and independent judiciary, and millions of Americans recently attended the “No Kings” protests. But it has started down an anti-democratic path, and many Americans — including people in positions of power — remain far too complacent about the threat.

It isn’t as bad as Trump wants it, or needs it, to be

We know who isn’t complacent right now, Stephen Miller.

The architect of Trump’s assault on America single-handedly sparked a major escalation in the president’s attempts to torment our great cities early this summer when he screamed at ICE for not behaving more like the Border Patrol and randomly swarming up towns and picking up anyone who even smelled of Mexican origin to them.

Since then, we’ve seen the ruthless operations in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. But, verily I tell you, they are not brutal enough for Miller.

That’s why Corey Lewandowski—Trump’s first campaign manager, who used his one big favor to install his precious Kristi Noem at the head of the Department of Homeland Security—has now taken what will likely be seen by future historians, should they exist, as a critical step in the escalation of totalitarianism in America. He wants to turn ICE into the Border Patrol.

This may seem like a difference without a distinction to anyone who knows how vile ICE can be, but in the latest episode of NEXT COMES WHAT, Andrea Pitzer draws on her work chronicling concentration camp regimes across the globe to give it some context. And, unfortunately, she has to use a Nazi analogy:

In one way, this is the reverse of the situation in the Third Reich a year or two into gaining power, in which the street-violence methods of the SA were eliminated and brought under a more rigid Nazi hierarchy. In the case of the U.S. in 2025, the administration is loosing the violent cowboys of the Border Patrol on the country, moving immigration enforcement farther outside any rigid control at all. The federal government is fueling chaos.

She goes on to describe how Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler guided Hitler and Nazi Germany into the madness of mass detentions, which by the end of the decade transformed into mass executions.

What does Reichsführer Stephen Miller have planned next for us?

Even Trump knows he better not tell us.

How far does Trump want to take this?

I’ve been critical of my new Senator Elissa Slotkin, who came into office determined, it seems, to take the Manchin/Sinema path of positioning herself in opposition to the Democratic base. She has, and continues, to take awful, some unforgivable, votes.

Yet she, with her CIA background, is seen by the Democratic Party establishment as a leading, credible voice on national security; when she, as a member of the House representing what may be the tightest district in the country, called for Trump’s impeachment over the extortion of Ukraine to try to frame the Bidens, that made it okay for the rest of the party to join in.

So I have to say I was cheered when I heard she gave a speech this week at the Brookings Institution on Trump’s AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK.

That was until I saw this speech. Here’s the most chilling section, which lays out the stakes of the threat we face as clearly as I’ve heard from anyone. And hearing it from Senator Slotkin, especially, cuts deep into my bones.

I almost hesitate to share this clip or fixate on it because it naturally leaves one in a bit of shock. You knew this, I’m sure you did. But hearing it starkly stated by someone in power who hesitates to use it confrontationally should be jarring. That’s the whole point.

Senator Slotkin can still say this and face the consequences, which will be far worse than they should be, but do not yet reach for the ice age of dissent we know Trump wants. That means there is still time to act, and our ability to act against this regime may never be greater.

And while Andrea, at the end of the episode above, does, as she always does, lay out practical steps we can take to fight this authoritarian rush at our freedoms, I have to remind myself — and you — that there is no one promised way out of this.

There is, however, one way to make sure Trump and Miller prevail and achieve the goal Slotkin describes for them: “making sure that he and his ilk never have to give up power.” And that’s to act as if they have already won.

You’ve heard, for almost a decade now, Timothy Snyder warning us against “Obeying in advance.” That once vague notion is now ridiculously concrete.

Trump and Miller have made their agenda clear. They want to label anyone against them as terrorists. They want to do this using a "three hop" justification, which means if anyone you know is vaguely connected to someone who is vaguely connected to someone who may be a terrorist or a drug dealer or whatever they pretend Antifa is, they can target you or Kevin Bacon. And they want they want the power to eliminate that imagined opposition without anything resembling a legitimate process, other than Miller saying “Go for it!” on Trump’s behalf.

And how do we help them?

By acting as if the people will allow that. We will not.

We act that way when we’re afraid to click the wrong view, share it, or support it. We act like that when we behave as if they’d want us to by refusing to be visible in the streets, in the offices of our elected officials, and in any venue where we have the right to stand up for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.

We should be cheered by the voters on Tuesday and by how Chicago has refused to cower and has embraced the only known antidote to fascism: solidarity.

We’re only seeing the shakeup at ICE because Trump and Miller don’t yet have the power they crave. Andrea explains:

My sense is that the administration has been overreaching consistently, and that this is yet another example. Compared to other countries where authoritarianism solidified, the federal government is rushing the persecuting-minorities side of its agenda before they have the kind of lock on suppressing dissent from the rest of the population usually seen in these situations.

We shouldn’t have to be brave. Life is hard enough.

But we do not choose our times only by how we face them. And if we face them together, we have not given them the thing they want most: our surrender to fear itself.

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