A Superpower Commits Suicide and Fascism Triumphs Part 6
Introduction
The hits just keep on coming here in the United States of 2025. Every morning I wake up wondering what fresh hells the day will bring. How many laws can the new Trump regime ignore at once? How little will the other two branches of government do to curb the excesses of the executive branch? How many people in the other branches of government are willing and excited to become powerless ciphers? How many people can the Trump regime persecute or injure? How feckless will the so-called “opposition” party be? How many scandals will emerge that show how evil and incompetent Trump and his cronies are? How quickly can the post second world war order be dismantled? How quickly can the US economy be driven into the Earth’s core? How quickly can the US isolate itself out of a position of global relevance? Are Russian and Chinese leaders in danger of laughing themselves to death?
Part 6 will focus mainly on two topics, the treatment of migrants and protesters of the Palestinian genocide. Since Part 5 was published these are the developments I have found most disturbing. Additionally I also believe the way we treat protesters and migrants reflects what actual American values are versus what we have always pretended they are. On the subject of American values I want to say something on the off chance some future historian finds this when looking at how people reacted to the events of 2025 as they were happening. Don’t you dare try to rationalize or excuse Americans who voted for Trump in 2024. They deserve all of the venom and scorn that can be thrown at them. Everyone who voted for Trump either knew exactly what they were getting and wanted it, or they cocooned themselves in deliberate and willful ignorance. Anyone who would excuse that is either just as hateful or just as ignorant. So if you are a historian of the future, especially a conservative historian, who might be tempted to write a contrarian history of this time period sympathizing and forgiving Trump voters, I have a favor to ask. Could you fall face first onto a sharp boulder? If you survive, maybe the head injury will actually make you smarter.
Concentration Camps in America, and El Salvador
In March of 2025 Trump’s regime sent a few hundred migrants to a prison in El Salvador with no due process and under the flimsiest pretext that they were “gang members.” As of this writing it’s one of the most blatantly tyrannical things the second Trump administration has done, and it portends much worse in the future. Even non-citizens are supposed to have fundamental rights and be entitled to due process under the law. Yet again, however, fascists have proved that laws and rights mean shit if not enough people fight to uphold them. As of this writing it’s not clear by what “logic” the Trump regime used to select the first group of people sent to El Salvador, but for some men it was because they had “suspicious” or “gang affiliated” tattoos that turned out to be completely innocuous. I want the reader to sit and think about that for a moment. Imagine the “wrong” skin color and a tattoo someone thought was suspicious was all it took for you to be sent to a torture prison in another country. Imagine how little regard one must have for the lives of other people to order something like this and to carry it out. Imagine a society that cares for the safety and rights of migrants and refugees so little that they allow this to happen.
For the people deported to El Salvador it must have been and continued to be a terrifying experience. To add to the misery and humiliation, Kristi Noem, the head of homeland security, decided to visit the prison where these men had been deported. It was an obvious and disgusting theatrical stunt, and it speaks multitudes about Noem’s character. What kind of person looks at other human beings and sees nothing but props and set dressing? The blatant injustice of how these people were treated, and how migrants have been treated in the United States for decades (or centuries) should have been outrageous. If the majority of Americans actually cared about fundamental human rights then America wouldn’t be where it was in 2025.
Even if Americans couldn’t bring themselves to care about the rights of others they should at least care about their own. Injustices never stop with just one group. Oppressors will always test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Every time they get away with something it emboldens them to push further and to target more people. Everyone has a moral as well as selfish motivation to fight for universal rights, a defense of someone else’s rights is a defense of their own. I don’t even have to be hypothetical or hyperbolic, after the first deportations of people to El Salvador Trump almost immediately threatened to send American citizens to the same prison. Which again is super illegal, but that super doesn’t matter. Now that threat is always hanging in the air, displease the regime and we might just disappear you to a prison in a foreign country.
What I’ve always found terrifying about humankind is not just that evil people can easily acquire power, it’s how many people are willing to participate in evil regimes. Every dictator needs millions of people to carry out their agenda. You can’t have a secret police hunting political dissidents without people willing to work for the secret police. You can’t have prisons and black sites dedicated to torture and privation without people who are excited to torture. The state can’t implement a reign of terror without a huge bureaucracy to handle the logistics and day to day needs of a terrorist state. I don’t think we appreciate this essential fact. Too often when we conceptualize evil regimes of the past in a way that ignores the individuals in that regime. The actions and decisions of individual functionaries in the state are condensed and woven into the state itself. The state becomes a leviathan, some massive and inhuman monster that devours its unsuspecting victims with the inevitability of fate. The more alarming reality is that evil is all too human, there is no leviathan. Just a collection of all the horrors human beings are willing to inflict on one another.
It’s frightening that the Trump regime was racist enough to deport hundreds of people and ignore every law and court order that stood in their way with impunity. What’s more frightening is how many people needed to participate to turn that hateful racist policy into hateful racist action. Everyone who helped facilitate this crime against humanity had no moral or legal objections, or they kept their objections to themselves. It’s frightening to see the racist core that lies in the hearts of so many Americans.
“The Only Crime Worse than Genocide is Protesting Genocide.” The Bible (probably)
Very quickly into Trump’s second term his cabinet (and everyone else involved) began carrying out threats that were made during the 2024 election. In the spring and early summer of 2024 there were wide-scale protests against Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In the US these protests were focused on university campuses all over the country. I wish I could say these protests accomplished anything, as I write this the genocide is still ongoing. The protests also made fascists furious, and they vowed to punish the malcontents who were upsetting their precious order if they won power in the 2024 election. I’ll say that again, they wanted to punish people whose “crime” was exercising their first amendment right to protest America’s complicity in a fucking genocide. In a decisive victory for human decency, America voted those fascists into power, who proceeded to do exactly what they said they were going to do.
At the time of this writing the Trump administration has already arrested and plans to deport several people who were involved in the 2024 protests. Initially these arrests were targeting non-citizens, people who were in the country as legal permanent residents or through a student visa. It will not stop with non-citizens though. If the Trump administration is willing to arrest non-citizens it is no leap at all to do the same to citizens. Why would they stop anyway? They have gotten away with literally everything else they have done, and they are obviously restrained by no sense of morality, decorum, or procedure. Protesting genocide is a crime now, one that can see you imprisoned and possibly deported.
This should terrify every American. There is no right to free expression, there is no first amendment, there is no democracy if the president can decide when you have rights and when you don’t. That level of arbitrary authority does not belong to a constitutional president, it belongs to an autocrat or a monarch. Even someone who had no interest in politics (if they ever bothered to pay attention) should have quaked in fear when protesters were arrested. Why? Because an attack on anyone’s rights is an attack on everyone’s. A defense of the rights of others is a defense of your own. If you can’t grasp that concept your brain is smoother than a pearl.
A Sad Victory Lap
In previous parts of this series I’ve had subsections called “Tariffs are a Tax on the Brain,” “Measles and Powdered Wigs are Making a Comeback,” and “How to Lose Friends and Influence No One.” A quick summary of “Tax on the Brain” is that Trump’s tariff policy would be a disaster for the US and global economy, they would weaken and isolate the country, and alienate America from every world government not staffed by idiots. “Measles and Powdered Wigs” tried to extrapolate on all the horrible things that would happen when you hand the federal department of health and human services to an anti-vaccine advocate. In short, calamity. People have already died due to the disruptions caused by firings and grant funding freezes, and the attacks on science and promotion of snake-oil cures has permanently damaged the American scientific community. America’s position as one of the preeminent countries of scientific research will never recover. “How to Lose Friends” focused on Trump extorting Ukraine and betraying them to the Russians. More generally this subsection described how Trump’s mafia style of foreign policy (tariffs are a part of this) will force countries of the world to form economic partnerships and strategic alliances that deliberately exclude the US. This long slow process has already begun when I write this in early April 2025. Trump’s foreign and economic policy is so stupid that he is getting China, Japan, and South Korea to cooperate more closely with one another. In a way it’s astonishing, who knew that one could be so stupid that old rivals could be driven into one another’s arms.
In the spring of 2025 there were finally growing voices in business, the scientific community, and among foreign leaders and foreign policy experts warning about the threat of Trump’s agenda. Obviously there were people sounding the alarm before the election, I’m simplifying for brevity’s sake. Anecdotally, however, I did notice an uptick in upset hand-wringing several months into 2025. I noticed this uptick because it made me furious. Why did it take this long for some people to become concerned? I spent the entire 2024 election cycle listening and reading everything coming from the Trump camp and thinking “this would all be catastrophic I sure as hell hope he isn’t elected.” I released the first part of this series two or three days after the election, which I can summarize into the sentence: We’re all screwed. I’m not taking credit for being smarter or seeing things other people didn’t. I’m wondering why on earth people with actual influence or authority didn’t speak out sooner. If all of this was obvious to me it should have been obvious to everyone. It would be like a person seeing a fire in their house and they sit there watching the fire grow in intensity, waiting to panic until half their house has been destroyed. Or imagine yourself standing on one end of a large open field, watching a giant bear charging at you from the other side of the field. You stand meek and motionless, and only respond when the bear has closed the distance and torn one of your arms off. Maybe the half of the house not consumed by fire can be saved, and through some miracle your one-armed self can survive the encounter with the bear. Permanent damage has been done though, damage that could have easily been avoided had anything been done sooner.
Why did some wait so long to be concerned? One reason is that a lot of people don’t pay attention to politics even when their livelihoods or actual lives hang in the balance of political outcomes. Another is that I think too many deluded themselves with statements like: “Trump wouldn’t do this or that, that would be unreasonable.” The only people in 2025 who could believe Trump was a reasonable man would had to have been in a coma since 2000. Also, where does this assumption that people in power can’t be irrational, stupid, or vindictive come from? Vulcans from the Star Trek universe who landed on earth two minutes ago could be forgiven for not understanding human behavior. Anyone that has ever met and interacted with another person should not be surprised by the Trump administration’s behavior and actions. We are a famously irrational and stupid species. One of the core parts of the human character is doing stuff that is pointlessly self destructive. What reason could the Trump administration have for knee-capping their own country? It could be because they want to destroy the United States and are doing it on purpose. Or they could be “saving” America in a way that only makes sense in the brain of a demented narcissist. In summary, I was right. I wish I wasn’t. More people should have seen this coming because it was blindingly obvious and overt. People are stupid.
Opposed to Opposition
Every victory is equal parts the successes of the victors and the mistakes of the defeated. The mistakes made by the Democratic party since at least 2016 have been legion. More specifically however, the fecklessness of most Democrats in power since the 2024 election was alarming and pathetic. With the exception of a few people and a few brief instances the Democratic party’s strategy of resistance was to either sit quietly and do nothing, or to actively collaborate with the Trump regime. I found Democrats’ attitude and responses to this dire crisis to be maddening, until I was reminded what a strong rightward turn Democratic leaders have made especially since 2020. The choice in the 2024 election was between a conservative party and a fascist party. I was initially baffled by how little public opposition there was from Democrats to the Trump admin’s treatment of migrants and pro-Palestine protesters. It was a lot less baffling when I realized many Democrats either didn’t care or largely agreed with the tactics and assumptions of the people targeting migrants and protesters. The Biden administration treated migrants with the same inhumanity as Trump did in his first term, and a disturbing number of Democrats treated pro-Palestine protesters with quiet disdain or publicly condemned them. You can’t really resist when you don’t disagree with what you’re supposed to be resisting.
Democrats in congress apparently never read a history book in their lives either. Strategists in the party said deranged things like: “We’ll just wait this out until the 2026 midterms.” If Democrats do see big wins in the midterms and are able to mount an effective congressional resistance that would be good, and I do hope that happens. However, the blithe assumption that there will be midterms is crazy. Who’s to say that Trump won’t crush any resistance long before the midterms can take place? Or that the elections won’t be manipulated to ensure Republicans maintain control of the house and the senate? Or that the legislature will be reduced to a toothless and symbolic body that will have no power to resist anything? Or that Trump won’t ignore the other branches of government and do whatever he wants (something that’s already been happening with the judiciary). All of these tactics have been deployed by authoritarians in the past to undermine democratic institutions. Hell, the Roman Republic that our system is largely based on saw the power of the senate reduced to a ceremonial advisory institution by the likes of figures like Caesar and Augustus. The blithe confidence among some Democrats that they could wait out this crisis and everything could return to normal is insane. For one thing, there is no going back to the way things were. More importantly, I cannot understand how anyone could miss the dangerous possibilities of an authoritarian future. I don’t know if it’s an example of more stupidity or more delusion.
Conclusion
I don’t have much to say here at the end because I’ve already repeated myself more than once and I will have to again since this series will stretch on indefinitely. What I will bring up for the first time (undoubtedly I’ll talk about this more in the future), is Trump’s increasingly frequent statements about running for a third term. Once again people blithely dismissed this saying that Trump can’t run for a third term because that would be unconstitutional. Because Trump cared so much about the constitution before. Trump has gotten away with every crime he has committed for his entire life. Why would a piece of paper slow him down? What would happen if Trump did run for a third term? Who would stop him? Trump doesn’t have to run himself to get back into power, he could pull a move from the classic authoritarian playbook. A loyal stooge could run for president, and if they get elected (or selected) they could be the figurehead while Trump is the real power behind the throne (I use the word throne advisedly). Vladimir Putin, a man Trump idolizes, did the exact same thing earlier in his political career. The threat of a third or fourth Trump term is not outlandish or fantastical, and the lack of concern is concerning.
But fear not! Someday the inherent goodness of humanity will win out over ignorance and hate. We just have to wait for that day. Which will happen any day now…Any day now…