The last few days have been one of those “Trump weeks.” You know, the ones that feel like a month? It’s been like this a lot since he took office for his second term but right now it feels like things are really coming to a head.
We’ve been dealing with the ups and downs of the daft tariff scheme that has got everyone in the country holding their breath waiting for the bottom to drop out of the economy. We’re seeing the civil service, the legal system, academia, corporations, even churches forced to deal with an unprecedented assault by a presidential administration bent on dominating every independent institution in our society. It feels like a tidal wave just relentlessly pushing through the fabric of our society and all you can do is just hang on to something and hope it holds long enough for the water to recede.
But something changed in the last week and it’s critical. The fundamental structure of the Constitution is now being assailed with direct threats to state and local sovereignty. Trump’s deportation push into Los Angeles opened up a set of issues that were closed for a long time in this country and which have the potential to tear us completely apart.
For as long as most of us can remember, “states’ rights” was the bedrock of conservative ideology in America. It formed the basis of many of the post civil war reconstruction policies and the southern states used it as a justification for Jim Crow for many decades. And while liberals didn’t approve of the use of states’ rights arguments used to deny universal human rights (and believed that those arguments were not made in good faith) they did not deny the concept of state sovereignty under our constitution. It’s obviously there, right in the document, and short of amending it or tearing it up altogether, it’s pointless to pretend that it doesn’t exist or only recognize it when it’s politically useful.
Recently, the conservative Supreme Court reified the idea with the Dobbs decision, reversing the constitutional right to abortion under Roe vs Wade. They held that states have the right to regulate abortion even including banning it altogether. This is actually considered a compromise among the anti-abortion zealots who believe that all abortion is murder but they were willing to take what they could get and live to fight for a total ban another day. So the concept of states’ rights still exists among conservatives, at least when it is useful to their cause.
The Trump administration may find it useful for some purposes as well but at the moment they appear to have decided that it is no longer operative. President Trump has ordered ICE to step up its raids in cities and states that are run by his political enemies:
He’s being very clear there about why he’s targeting these cities. It’s not because of immigration, although he’s using that as an excuse. After all, two of the three states with the largest populations of people in the U.S. illegally are the red states of Texas and Florida. He’s also exempted the agriculture, hospitality, and meatpacking industries, which apparently aren’t part of the “Democratic Power Center.” (The construction and manufacturing sectors better get on the ball and start doing some serious bootlicking.) No, he sees this as a way to start a conflagration in these cities which gives him the excuse to federalize them by sending in troops outside the control of local elected officials.
On his way to the G7 Summit on Sunday he told the assembled press on the tarmac that if he hadn’t ordered the federalized national guard to Los Angeles last week the city would be on fire:
That is nonsense. There are protests and LAPD is handling them. He’s saying to make the case for keeping troops in the city. He also sent active duty marines to Los Angeles for no reason and his order applies to any city he chooses. It’s almost certain he will do the same to these other cities in the “Democrat Power Centers.”
There’s a method to his madness even if he doesn’t fully recognize it himself. Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” wrote in the NY Times that Trump calling up troops to patrol the streets of Los Angeles, his partisan speech at Ft Bragg and the vulgar military birthday parade on Saturday, shows that he is trying to get the American public used to a different relationship with the military. In this new version we are to see the military as an institution that explicitly serves the president and his political agenda.
She goes on to explain that this is often a way that despots exert power and observes:
The Trump administration is now using the second-largest city in the country as a backdrop for its efforts to create the perception of a national crisis. Doing so could allow it to justify measures that would empower the government to act against its own citizens. This is concerning enough. Even more worrying is what history shows us: that all too often, such crises become semi-permanent — “not the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed.
The rhetoric in Trump’s Sunday post that Democratic politicians and their voters are “sick of mind” and “hate our country” means it is likely that there will be more arrests and roughing up of Democratic politicians who try to do their jobs. And we can probably expect more violence as we saw this weekend in Minneapolis when a far right extremist assassinated a Democratic politician and her husband and wounded two others. That’s the crisis he is determined to provoke.
But I don’t think he should count on the public at large, even in red states, complying with his plans. For all of his activity this past week, there was one event that dwarfs them all.
This is rigorous analysis by credible data researchers and it, along with the polling that’s been done in recent days, shows that the majority of the public is not fooled. (From the way the troops marched in his very low-energy parade, they aren’t sold on it either.)
The best case scenario is that this is just another one of his paroxysms of hate and he’ll move on to something else soon. (Unlikely because of his fanatical, bigoted adviser Stephen Miller, unfortunately. ) The worst case scenario is that we are in for a long, hot summer. But it looks like the American people are ready for some serious passive resistance and he can’t repress us if we won’t let him.