It is hard to imagine more chaos than we in the US face right now — though I fear we will find out what more is like. Certainly chaos as a function of time has had an upward slope. Trump’s tariffs have wreaked havoc with the economy, and while, as Paul Krugman pointed out yesterday, the economy has proved remarkably resilient, the “hits keep coming.” Pete Hegseth plays tin soldier with the height-of-stupidity war with Iran, meanwhile deconstructing our military in astoundingly rapid fashion. Trump desecrates the people’s White House and other DC institutions, launches attacks on national parks, and has the US Mint issue a coin with his likeness on it. ICE, more quietly but more perniciously, continues to round up and deport immigrants and increasingly has its sights set on US citizens that it deems are in its way. Republicans in Congress could not possibly be more feckless, such that even the slightest show of resistance garners substantial media attention. And SCOTUS increasingly gives Trump carte blanche, completely oblivious to what is actually happening on the ground and completely hypocritical in its majority rationale. (Part of jurisprudence is supposed to be prudence, which the Court now sorely lacks.) The list could go on and on.

Most serious, most dangerous for the long run, though, is Trump’s multi-front assault on voting rights, all rationalized on the back of the fraudulent claim that non-citizen voting is widespread, when in fact it is exceedingly rare. Never mind that Trump’s own DHS has twice tried to produce evidence without success. The Red Scare of today is the irrational fear among voters on the right that someone not a citizen is going to enter a voting booth. Many right-leaning voters believe that an election is tainted if even one non-citizen votes. In a February poll, 72% of GOP voters favored “doing everything possible to stop illegal immigrants from voting” over “ensuring that eligible citizens are not denied the ability to vote.” Never mind that the draconian measures — drastic restriction of mail-in voting; DOJ, FBI and very likely ICE and military at polling places (in violation of the law); punitive voter ID regulations — would disenfranchise millions of voters, possibly including them. I hope that now that the realities of voter suppression are more real, the number would be different today — but clearly we have work to do. 

And the chaos around voting is part of Trump’s goal. The chaos itself is a voter-suppression tactic. Trump’s sole goal is to maintain power, and he knows full well that a free and fair midterm election most likely will not achieve that and could subject him to yet another impeachment. 

That’s Trump. But why are so many people — an overempowered minority, but a substantial number nonetheless — still in thrall to such an obviously tyrannical person?

Across the board we are witnessing a phantasmagorical-fascistic ideology run completely amok. 

In this respect, I found this recent post by Ruth Ben-Ghiat to be telling: “Origin Stories: How Trump Broke the GOP.” Part of the story is that while, yes, Trump had to break the GOP, the GOP was in fact ripe for this kind of breakage:

The Republican party, and the robust media universe that supported it, were ready for a far-right, rule-breaking, and polarizing personality like Trump. A 2012 assessment by the political scientists Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann captures key elements of an illiberal move that by 2016 had primed Republicans to accept Trump’s candidacy:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

By the time Trump started his candidacy, the Republican party was a party of white supremacist zealots, gun-rights extremists, and leaders like McConnell who had long approved of subverting voting rights and other bedrocks of democracy. This is why Trump’s many actions that promised a decidedly anti-democratic future for America were not deal-breakers: the retweets of neo-Nazi memes, the dark allusions to having his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, shot, and much more.

(For another chilling take, see this book review in The New York Times: “What the Third Reich Can Teach Us About America Today“)

I want to offer words of hope, but it’s not easy. Perhaps determination and even faith are more appropriate. We can draw inspiration from the people who are standing up; from the polling that points toward, ceteris paribus, large Democratic gains in the midterms; from the emergence of a new generation in the Democratic Party that is refusing to be cowed. We the People can save our democracy. But we have to know that the hits will keep on coming. We have to not let the chaos chill our resolve.