As I wrote last week, President Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s first five days in office were a grim augury. It has only gotten worse in the ensuing three.

The most alarming incidents were the Friday Night Massacre of the critical mass of IGs, the suspension of virtually all foreign aid; and a freeze on all domestic federal funding, including monies already duly authorized by Congress. Like the previous week’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, all are deeply worrying, not just because of the specific policies in question (though those are plenty worrying), but because they represent a brazen power grab—that is, illegal attempts to vastly expand the power of the executive branch by fiat. They are also very obviously probes of our democracy’s beleaguered defenses to see if anyone—the GOP, Congressional Democrats, the judiciary (especially the Supreme Court), as well as the press and the general public—will push back in any substantive way.

So far, few have. More on that in a bit.  

But we’ve seen this movie before, in country after country that has come under assault by aspiring autocrats. We know how it ends, and it’s a lot like Old Yeller.

We are in a crisis like none before in American history, not even from 2017 to 2021, when unprecedented national emergencies became as regular as the firing of Jets head coaches. Yes, we have faced daunting external enemies from the Wehrmacht to Al Qaeda. But not since the Civil War have we faced a homegrown threat of this magnitude, and never one in this form.

The American people willingly elected as our president the most wantonly criminal and openly immoral public figure in our country. In his first week and a half in office, with all the levers of power at his disposal and virtually no checks on his bluntly announced intention to abuse them, he has set about rapidly dismantling American governance domestically and destroying our foreign policy globally, while preparing to enrich himself and his cronies through graft and corruption on a scale never before seen in a US president. Are we surprised?

No one in his craven party is willing to stand up and stop him, even when they know that vast damage is being done. The oligarchs of the business community are taking his side in hopes of benefiting themselves. Major outlets in the mainstream media are sanewashing his efforts. The opposition party by and large is acting as if this is politics as usual and bringing its customary featherduster to a flamethrower fight.

Every rational observer knew that this was where we were headed with his election (or re-election, I should say, to make it even more bitter). But few thought it would happen so fast or to such extremes. Donald Trump is the moral equivalent of the California wildfires, and in just a month or two, American life may well resemble that same sort of smoking wasteland.

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE FREEZE-OUT

You can learn a lot about military terminology —and the French language, and a little Spanish too—by watching Trump. January 6^th and the maneuvers that led up to it were an autogolpe—a self-coup, or at least an attempt at one. What we’re seeing now is more of a coup de main.

Trump has long signaled his infantile desire to be a dictator: in his shameless fanboying for foreign tyrants like Putin, Orbán, Xi, Erdoğan, and Duterte; in his fondness for a neo-autocratic system (“I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want”); and most brazenly, in his overt declarations to that end, like musings about a third term, or worse. Thanks to the justice system’s failure to move swiftly and hold him accountable, and to the Supreme Court’s despicable, openly dishonest willingness to pronounce him above the law, we are now seeing those factors bear poisonous fruit.

Trump infamously said he’d be a dictator only on “day one.” That appears to have been a pretty severe underestimation of how long he’d like that gig. As the blogger Robert B. Hubbell wrote this week:

He is no longer operating within the pale of the law. On Monday, January 27, Trump dropped all pretense of being a “president” within the meaning of Article II of the US Constitution and began wielding power for his own benefit and without regard for constitutional restrictions.

Some bonus authoritarian moves, also carried out yesterday: Trump also fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on investigations into his criminal activities, and had the acting US Attorney for Washington DC open an investigation of the prosecutors who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s J6 team. As Hubbell notes: “While some presidents have secretly used the FBI, IRS, and DOJ to investigate their political foes, no president in the history of our nation has publicly ordered the DOJ to investigate his perceived political enemies, much less fire them.” By contrast, his threat to invade the sovereign territory of a NATO ally barely moves the needle. It’s a sliding scale of outrages these days.

But let’s drill down a little more on the federal funding freeze.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports that the “scope of this power-grab is impossible to overstate, as are its devastating ramifications.” He also notes that this is actually the same “impoundment” process that Trump used to illegally block funds allocated for Ukraine, an action that got him impeached the first time, in 2019.

The list of programs that would have been affected is nearly endless: It appeared to include Medicaid, children’s health insurance, HIV/AIDS care, addiction treatment, nutrition assistance, housing vouchers, education funding, law enforcement, farmers’ aid, infrastructure projects, early childhood education, disaster relief—and that’s just the start. Millions of Americans, especially in low-income communities, rely on these programs for food, shelter, health care—in short, survival.

But we know that for Trump the cruelty is incidental—if not the point. (Can we make that a permalink? Because Adam Serwer’s formulation appears in almost every issue of this blog.) Stern again:

(T)he upshot is clear: President Donald Trump wants to seize control of the spending power from Congress in order to paralyze large portions of the government, canceling duly enacted appropriations by executive decree. This move is flatly illegal, a flagrant breach of federal law as well as the president’s own constitutional obligations.

As Ed Kilgore writes in New York Magazine, “Letting Trump delay or cancel any appropriation he doesn’t like really would abolish Congress’s constitutionally enumerated spending power, and give the president the kind of power only true dictators enjoy.” That is precisely the idea, and as Stern writes, deliberately “tees up a massive legal battle that will test whether this Supreme Court is willing to put any restraints on a president who seeks to rule as a dictator.”

On that front, there have been a couple of mildly encouraging moments.

Late today a federal judge temporarily blocked that federal funding freeze from going into effect, much as, last week, another federal judge temporarily blocked the attempt to end birthright citizenship. Indeed, these brave acts by the oft-maligned federal judiciary constitute the most robust resistance thus far to Trump’s aggressive Adolf-like campaign to consolidate power. So let’s say those federal judges’ names, because they deserve the honor. In the funding case, it was US District Judge Loren AliKhan; in the birthright case, US District Judge John C. Coughenour, who called Trump’s edict “blatantly unconstitutional,” adding, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” 

But the danger remains. What happens when those cases get up to Trump’s handpicked SCOTUS? Will these lower court rulings ultimately be mere speed bumps on the road to a fascist autocracy? Trump’s legal team has apparently constructed a tortured Rube Goldberg-style “originalist” rationalization for the funding freeze, but Stern wonders whether even the bought-and-paid-for right wing supermajority on the Supreme Court will go along with it, as the Constitution is so clear on the matter of Congress’s ultimate authority in this area.

Trump could have created a more favorable test case to press his theory, targeting some arguably wasteful spending with little impact on people’s lives. Instead, he swung one of the biggest axes he could find…..And the justices do not appreciate being treated like a rubber stamp.

Then again, until last July no one thought they’d rule that Trump was a king, either.

Stern assigns some of the blame to the Court itself for this current mess:

In their zeal to create a “unitary executive,” the conservative justices issued a series of opinions abolishing traditional restrictions on presidential power. It was inevitable that Trump would push this precedent to the limit, then keep going; given how much he had already gotten away with, why not swing even bigger this time?

If the court does not draw the line at impoundment, it is difficult to envision what checks remain on the presidency. This is a five-alarm fire for American democracy. And even if the Supreme Court extinguishes it, the conservative justices will bear some responsibility for the scorched earth left behind.

The question is whether they will care.

APPEASEMENT, COLLABORATION, AND FECKLESSNESS, LLP

One thing we learned in Trump 1.0—or should have—is that It Always Turns Out Even Worse Than We Feared. And we feared it would be pretty bad in Trump 2.0. You can’t see me sitting here at my keyboard, typing this, but I’m doing an audible cartoon gulp at what that portends for the next four years.

Only nine days ago, on the eve of the inauguration. I wrote a blog called “Twenty-One Months,” aimed at boosting our morale by noting how short the timeline is for Trump to enact his agenda, and how soon we will have the opportunity to constrain him legislatively in the midterms. Now that feels naïve to say the least. If this brazen power grab continues, there may be no midterms in 21 months, or ever, except Potemkin ones.

Things are going on in this White House that in 2017—or, indeed, at any previous time in American history—would have prompted outraged protest in the streets and aggressive pushback within Congress. But this time, largely crickets. Well, not crickets, but certainly not a deafening swarm of cicadas.

With relatively few exceptions, like AOC, the Democratic Party is completely useless. Even otherwise heroic figures like now-Senator Adam Schiff seem unable to navigate this treacherous new terrain. Yes, voting to confirm Rubio to preserve capital to oppose RFK and Tulsi and Drunken Pete and Ka$h might have been reasonable in past administrations, , but it’s inconceivable that past administrations would have nominated a rogues’ gallery like that, or proposed that the villains to run Gotham City. In this moment, obstructionism should be absolute, IMHO. (I’m sorry, sir! I’m still a fan, but please make thick your blood and screw your courage to the sticking place.)

And don’t even get me started on Fetterman.

The Fourth Estate is no better. This week on the Internet, I watched the otherwise sane and savvy policy expert Ian Bremmer spend a half hour discussing Trump’s foreign policy (such as it is) as if he were just another conventional politician, and pooh-poohing the idea that he poses a threat to democracy. The Washington Post, which is run by billionaire Jeff Bezos when he’s not dressed in a French maid’s outfit and cleaning the toilets at Mar-a-Lago, has lately run a series of fawning pro-Trump columns including a recent one  by Shadi Hamid that reads like it was ghost-written by the doctor who once proclaimed Trump to be more or less superhuman. I won’t link to any of that trash, because Trumpist propaganda doesn’t need any more help, but you can seek it out if you wish. It won’t fill you with confidence that the MSM is going to save us.

Among journalists, one of the most clarion voices calling out the danger has been Rebecca Solnit. It is via her that I came across the aforementioned Robert Hubbell, who writes, “It is time for the institutions fighting for democracy to drop the niceties and begin calling Trump for what he is.”

Many institutions are still treating Trump as though he is a “normal” president, albeit one subject to making impulsive, ignorant statements. Criticizing his actions is not enough. The story of his first week is not that ‘Trump has shaken things up,’ or that he is “flooding the zone.” It is that Trump has begun to ignore the law at whim.

(But) Trump is unable to act like a dictator unilaterally. He needs the consent, acquiescence, and apathy of enough people to frustrate the normal operation of constitutional and legal checks and balances. We must not grant that assistance to Trump. We must resist. We must say in plain language that he is acting like a dictator who holds himself above the law. Whether he gets away with the audacious gambit is up to the people from whom all constitutional power flows.

This is it, as our British friends like to say. As experts from Masha Gessen to Tim Snyder to Gene Sharp have observed, even in the worst police states, most power is freely given to the authorities…..and we collectively are freely giving this tinhorn Mussolini license to become the despot he so plainly longs to be. There is an old adage that a nation gets the government that it deserves. Unfortunately, that collective “nation” includes lots of innocent folks who vehemently oppose Trump and Trumpism, but are caught up in this monstrosity foisted upon us by a vile far right minority, and an apathetic, low-information majority.

But the corollary, then, is that if the people alone can give power to a tyrant, we can also take it away again.

BULLET TRAIN TO PALOOKAVILLE

The backbone shown by some federal district judges is encouraging. Maybe they’ll inspire the Mudville Nine a little higher up the chain, though I’m not counting on it. Likewise those stalwart voices in the press: might they shame the Post and the Times and others who are currently bending the knee to the White House? In the words of Brian Wilson, wouldn’t it be nice?

But ultimately the pressure has to come from us, the public. A few brave judges and a few bold journalists and one Bronx congresswoman cannot carry the load alone.

Is the time for a general strike fast approaching? Maybe. It’s an option of nearly last resort. But the death train to totalitarianism is traveling a lot faster than even the most pessimistic among us predicted. Last week, I concluded by saying how worried I am that we are drifting toward an Orbán-style autocracy. Let me correct that. Turns out we are not “drifting” toward it so much as rocketing there on a shinkansen.

I’m almost afraid to see what next week will bring.

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Illustration: Seen on Etsy; artist unknown. But it might just be a picture of Dorian Gray situation.