He’s coming for you and yours
The No Kings protests over the weekend were the largest yet. Over 8 million people protested. The question is will the backlash to Trump 2.0 be effective enough soon enough, assuming at all.
Without quoting Martin Niemöller yet again, here are just a few items by which Trump is coming our freedoms and demolishing the country almost as quickly as the East Wing.
Robert Kagan warns in The Atlantic that the U.S. is now a rogue superpower. Much of the world saw it not as a threat to contain, but “a partner to be enlisted.” Now it has might without right:
Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.
About Trump-Miller’s effort to end birthright citizenship, the Washington Post considers the potential casualties, including a 5-month-old born here to non-citizens. While the rest of us worry about voter disenfranchisement, her parents worry about being deported and their American-born child becoming stateless:
Supporters of birthright citizenship say its demise would tear at the economic and social fabric of the country and undermine an ideal that has made the United States a beacon for persecuted and impoverished migrants for generations.
Roughly 250,000 children would be born without citizenship in the United States each year if Trump’s order is upheld, or about 5 million by 2045, according to a friend of the court brief in the case filed by a group of 141 professors.
They argue that ending birthright citizenship would create a swath of society with limited access to education, health care and social safety net programs and would damage the American economy.
Politico considers the plight of Francesca Albanese, targeted with sanctions by the Trump administration for speaking out against U.S. policy on Gaza and against tech giants profiting from “the starvation and killing of the Palestinians of Gaza.”
The Atlantic examines the legal jeopardy of Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials last May. She’s asked a judge to dismiss the charges citing the Constitution’s speech-or-debate clause as her shield.
But this administration respects no constitutional rights that get in its way. Cross them, or bear the wrong genes, and you are a target. If not now, eventually, as Niemöller warned.
Digby cited Yonatan Touval’s column on how Trump misjudged the Iranian response to his war. Not comprehending other people, and lacking any historical understanding, Trump fantasized that military power was enough to make Iran buckle. Touval writes:
Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. A leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.
But by that same token, many of us, failed to comprehend the mind of men like Trump and MAGAs who swear allegiance to him with a religious fervor. They too are willing to let their country burn rather than share power with people they consider inferiors, as disloyal to Dear Leader, and as usurpers of white dominance which they’ve considered for centuries their birthright.
For now, the fire is metaphorical. The danger is real.