So How Does It End?

This is sort of a sequel to my earlier post about anarchy in America that I wrote in January.

Having seen Trump impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico (the latter two have been delayed by a month) and having seen him gut - or attempt to gut - the administrative state, I don't think this course he has set for the nation is sustainable or bearable.  Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people will be hurt, and many will lose their livelihoods and possibly their lives.  There is just no way Trump can keep himself in power when there is that much discord in the country.  There will be economic dislocation and a breakdown of popular norms that will make Americans desperate enough to take action against their collective situation.

I continue to believe that Trump will not finish his term.  I expect him to be deposed from the Presidency, and he will face justice for his crimes one way or another.  I don't know how it will happen or when it will happen, but it will happen.  I do know how it will not happen; he will not be impeached if the Democrats take back the House in 2026, because even a big swing to the Democratic Party that helps them take back the Senate will not give them enough votes to convict in the upper chamber.  I still believe it will happen through, umm, extraconstitutional means.  The MAGA movement will fall, but the process of MAGA's downfall will not be pretty.   

Let me be blunt: There will be violence.  I said that in January, and I still believe it now.  I'm not prepared to say that Trump himself will survive the violent reaction to his administration.  Though, if he does survive, he'll likely wish he hadn't.  I think violence will be inevitable, and it may be - may be - the only way out of our current predicament.  Change by the bullet rather than by the ballot remains the likelier scenario because this past November was our last chance to prevent Trump Mark Two.  Change by the ballot cannot reverse Trump Mark Two, and even if we have free and fair elections in the midterms that helps Trump's adversaries, those elections are still two years off and too much damage has already been done in two short weeks.    

And once he's deposed, the line of succession won't hold.  The purge of Trump will be a purge of all Trumpism, because the economy and the quality of life in These States will have deteriorated that much.  Vance won't be President, and neither will Mike Johnson.  What replaces the regime is unknown, just as the answer to how Trump will be removed from office is unknowable.  Will violence lead people in the government to take Trump out of power?  Or will violence itself lead to Trump's removal?

And what will be done with him?  A Nuremberg-like trial?  Incarceration without trial?  Exile? Internal exile?  Being dragged through the streets to meet the same fate as Mussolini?

As I said in my January post, Trump will not flee Washington, and he won't take his own life in the White House.  But there's going to be a big mess the second he's out, like a fire-gutted building that rubble is still falling from,  or a boat run aground with a hole in its hull that needs to be repaired before it can take to sea again.  People are going to have to figure out how to put America back together.  As for leadership . . . well, there's going to be new leadership somehow.  Maybe the military will take over and rewrite the Constitution to eliminate the ambiguities that make the undermining of civil rights possible.  Maybe a bicameral council of House members and senators will take over and call for new elections to be held after a recovery period.  It's likely not going to be brought about by peaceful, familiar means.  

Maybe, as I've said before, the union of the states will not persist.  Rather, it will go the way of the U.S.S.R. or Yugoslavia . . . and thus new American leadership won't be brought about at all.

It's Too Late

How out of control is der Drumpf Reich after only two weeks in office?  Let's examine the evidence:

• Der Drumpf Reich offered buyouts to federal employees to get them to resign with the threat of being fired. This is how Chancellor Elon Musk gutted Twitter when he bought it and renamed it X.
• The Reich gave Musk access to the private information of federal employees for Musk to use to intimidate them.  Then the same power was given to the Treasury Department, which allows Musk access to the personal information of all Americans.
• It canceled events and programs in the Defense Department related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and recognition of all month-long or day-long celebrations of DEI.  That not only means terminating events and programs related to Black History Month, Women's History Month, Hispanic History and Heritage Month, and Lithuanian-American Heritage Month (no such thing, just wanted to make sure you were paying attention)  but not even recognizing official holidays like Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, which Trump will likely have eliminated from the federal holiday roster.
• After a horrendous plane crash over National Airport on the Potomac River in which an airliner collided with a Black Hawk helicopter, the Dear Leader blamed DEI for the disaster, even though there were apparently no women or people of color at the helm of either aircraft or of the air-traffic control tower.
• Musk forced out the head of the Federal Aviation Administration as payback for an FAA investigation into SpaceX.
• The Reich tried to freeze on federal funds to all programs two ways of Greenwich and tried to deny that the freeze was still on to a federal judge when it in fact was.  The judge placed a hold on the freeze with a temporary restraining order, which will likely lead to an injunction.
• Almost as soon as Vice President Vance said that only the January 6 participants who merely went to the Capitol to demonstrate, and not the violent insurrectionists who killed and assaulted police officers, would be pardoned, the Dear Leader pardoned . . . all of them.
• The Leader announced legal action against PBS for airing commercials - something PBS has had to do to balance its books since the early seventies when Nixon changed its funding formula to prevent it from becoming as independent as the BBC in the United Kingdom. 
• He has now imposed 25-percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico (over alleged illegal shipments of Fentanyl crossing the borders), which has caused our two neighbors to retaliate, and he has imposed a 15 percent tariff on China, which the Chinese are going to protest at the World Trade Organization. 

Plus too many more to list.

 

I'm likely going to have to do a list like this every week for the next four years.  If I live that long.  Between Musk getting control of my private information and Kash Patel (below) getting control over the FBI, I am probably a dead man already.  Through the feds will likely go after the Meiselas brothers first. 😢  It's not because of what I've written about the Dear Leader since January 20, 2025; it's what I'd written about him before then.   Everything I've written about him in the past several years is there for everyone to see, and even if I deleted all of it, it would still be on Blogger.com's servers.  Nothing on the Internet is ever really deleted.

All right, maybe I won't get sent to Guantanamo (Spanish for Dachau), since my blog is small potatoes and I get fewer readers in a year than the Meiselas brothers get viewers in a day.  And truthfully, even the Meiselas brothers won't get sent to Dachau-by-the-Sea and will likely only get bankrupted.  But, even though I will continue to speak out and speak up, I have no illusions as to how this will all end.  Opponents of the Reich are already calling for organizing for the 2026 midterms to put in Democratic majorities in the 120th Congress and hold the regime accountable, but the Leader probably is already working on contingency plans to have Congress dissolved and replaced with a rubber-stamp legislature that only meets twice a year and ratifies his decrees unanimously - it will even be even less democratic than the bi-annual Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' General Conferences, where you can express yourself freely only by abstaining from voice votes. No, I continue to believe that, if the Leader is to be deposed before January 2029 - and he will be - it will be in a scenario that parallels the Russian Revolution or the fall of the Hapsburg dynasty in Austria.  The military may have to step in to restore order and maybe rewrite the Constitution to get rid of all the ambiguities that allow the suppression of  voting rights and the denial of gender equality - and the Second Amendment, because the National Guard units - the well-regulated militias - don't need to be constitutionally guaranteed anymore.   

But restoring order and democratic norms peacefully, through the ballot box and peaceful assembly - the latter of which will probably be snuffed out by presidential fiat? Sorry.  That time is past.  We had our chance on November 5 of last year.  Restoring order by peaceful means?

It's too late.  I could be wrong, and I'd like to be, but I'm probably not.  It's just . . . too . . . late.  So don't ask me to join the resistance against Der Drumpf Reich to save my country because, since I don't have to leave America because America already left me, I don't have a country anymore.

(Correction:  The above photo is not a picture of Kash Patel.  It's a picture of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.  I regret the error.)

Anarchy In the U.S.A.?

Donald Trump has already done considerable damage to the United States, and he's just getting started.  If you think his executive orders and his January 6 pardons are terrible, you're in for worse to come.

Right now, things look bleak enough.  Trumpism is dominant, MAGA is on the march, and there's less resistance than acceptance.  The Democrats, having expected to be in a period of triumph at this time for electing the first black female President, are too traumatized to object to Trump.  None of them have stepped forward to rally the party and, by association, anti-Trump Americans.  It seems that for every executive order that lawsuits have been filed against, there are at least two executive orders that are perfectly legal (like any executive order pulling the United States out of international agreements, for example).  There is more to come.  This is not going to end well.

However, I don't think this will end on January 20, 2029.  I don't even think it will only end later than that.  I think it will end sooner.

Trump is still threatening to take actions in foreign affairs that are sure to rile up other countries and isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world - more than it already is now.  He's likely to rattle his saber against Panama for control of the Panama Canal, and his historically based claims to the canal have disturbing parallels to Adolf Hitler's claim to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor in 1939, which led to the German invasion of Poland that began World War II.  An American invasion of Panama wouldn't necessarily began a global war, but it would cause severe economic dislocation in the world and might cause especially severe shortages and hyperinflation based on the scarcity of goods - both from the disruption caused in Panama and economic sanctions against the United States by the European Union and China.  Black markets would form.   Chaos would ensue.  State and local governments would have to  deal with civil unrest on a regular basis.   

We might not even need an illegal occupation of Panama for all that.  How about Trump's threatened deportations of Hispanic migrants, which would rattle the domestic economy because of all of the work migrants do to keep the flow of goods and services moving?  The actor Luis Avalos once called Hispanics the "dynamo" of American life; this is what he meant.  A forced removal of migrant workers would cause a breakdown of the country's economic system, and that would have the same effect as an international crisis in Panama.  

And what about Trump's withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which I talked about yesterday?  He likely gave, inadvertently, more control of the organization to China, which will inevitably further corrupt an already compromised international body.  All we need is another pandemic - not even a so-called "once in a century" pandemic like COVID, just a pandemic that causes enough instability and paranoia - or even an epidemic, and chaos results.

Any of these scenarios - and scenarios I haven't even pondered yet -  could lead to dysfunction of the federal government and encourage Trump to try to "dominate the streets" - not just in Washington but in other cities.  The entire system could collapse or could fall progressively in a domino effect.  It all leads to one thing - anarchy.

A breakdown of the system will inevitably lead to violence and destruction.  We don't need invading armies to lay waste to the homeland the way the Union did to the Confederacy in 1865 or the way the Allies did to Nazi Germany in 1945.  We're capable of rendering Washington by ourselves to the same fate as Richmond after the fall of the Confederate government or Berlin after the Red Army subdued it.  And Trump will likely stay in the White House - the physical building, I mean - but while he may not flee like Jefferson Davis or commit suicide like Adolf Hitler, he will definitely be deposed.  He could be taken captive by ordinary citizens who scale the fences of the White House and storm the mansion itself.  If that sounds unthinkable, remember that January 6 was unthinkable.  So was the idea that militant "students" in another country could scale the fence of our embassy there and storm the building and take its inhabitants hostage for a year and change - with their government's support. 

The United States, being a continent-sized nation of nation-sized states, won't feel the affects of such anarchy equally.  Some areas of the country will fare better than others, though it would be an uneducated guess as to which states would come out more favorably.  But once Trump is gone under such circumstances - circumstances of his own doing - the United States will be a wounded nation, a country that will need to be rebuilt physically and socially.  And I don't think the rest of the world will have much sympathy for us, so there won't be a Marshall Plan for us.  We'll be on our own.  

If we still have a country by then.  We could end up being a dozen separate countries, because even though mass merchandising and a nationalized consumer economy have rendered every place in America the same - "you make a right at Home Depot, pass two lights and make a left at Wal-Mart, pass McDonald's, and then you turn right into the parking lot of the mall where the Macy's wing is" - regional differences based on culture and politics still reign supreme.  An ugly highway of strip stores and shopping malls in Illinois may look no different than an ugly highway of strip stores and shopping malls in Texas, but the values of the people in each of those states are quite different indeed.   I even made a map of how I think the United States might split up.  (Click on the map to get a better look at it.)

Don't assume that this can't happen.  Back in 1978, when Pope John Paul II assumed the throne of Peter and began his crusade against communism in Eastern Europe, everyone agreed that the idea of the Soviet Union splitting up into fifteen separate countries was preposterous.