Shutting down an already broken America
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The Trump Regime seeks to control every aspect of American life – to reshape our government, economy, and our culture. It misses no opportunity to do so.
The pursuit of total control is relentless, from shaking down tech companies for multi-million dollar settlements (and then mocking said company’s CEO for its capitulation) to changing autoresponders on government email addresses and adding pop-ups to federal agency websites, blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The Regime is also pulling federal funding from blue states and threatening to fire thousands of federal government workers. It gathered top military brass to a meeting where President Trump suggested using US cities and the people who live in them as a “training ground” for the armed forces, referring to us as an “invasion from within.” The Regime is even threatening to send ICE to the Super Bowl over news that Puerto Rican rap superstar Bad Bunny will be the halftime show this year.
The Trump Regime’s power grab is so all-encompassing that it can be hard to conceptualize or process, even as we’re living through it. But America’s best essayist (at least in my opinion), Tressie McMillan Cottom penned a piece that manages to describe it in a holistic way:
Read the whole thing, but this in particular stuck out for me:
The president of the United States has both direct coercive power of the state and, by and large, indirect power over communication institutions. He has shown how he will use that power. He will punish enemies, yes. And if you agree that teachers, librarians, professors, left-leaning journalists and anyone who isn’t white, conservative and Christian are enemies, you may enjoy this comeuppance. But he has also shown that he will punish people who agree with him — but not enough or not in the right way or just because it is a Tuesday.
The merging of state power and economic power around one man who accepts that power as his due would not be possible without the algorithmic grift that has so all-consumingly captured our attention. The internet and the people who, for all intents and purposes, now own it have excelled at making Trump good at authoritarianism. They commodified information. They quelled regulation. They escaped blame for degrading collective action while raking in profits for spectacles of violence that degradation predictably produces. Now, via their president, they are using it to crush the First Amendment, to supercharge the Second Amendment, to stand up bot armies and real armed militias to defend their ownership of your civil liberties.
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the current government shutdown and how it’s hitting differently for me than other shutdowns in recent memory. At first, I thought it was because I no longer live in DC, a company town where the impacts of a shutdown are immediately felt. But then it hit me: things already feel so broken. The Trump Regime has been hard at work trying to break the government with Project 2025, DOGE, etc, since coming back into power. The Supreme Court seems more than happy to be a rubber stamp for the regime, and there are countless examples of institutional capitulation all around us. The current shutdown in many ways feels like yet another step in an ongoing process: the complete breakdown of America as we knew it.
Among my friends and family, even among colleagues and experts I talk with regularly, there’s a growing awareness of this. That saving democracy, as we tried to do for years, is no longer an option. It’s time to look toward what’s next. I’m starting to hear phrases like soft secession and blue state divorce used casually, by people I don’t consider especially political and even by people working in pro-democracy spaces. There’s a strong sense of we didn’t vote for this, we don’t want this, and we’re sick of our lives being controlled by the people who do want this. Crucially, there’s a growing financial frustration, we’re sick of paying into a system and giving our economic power away to the people who do want this.
These conversations used to annoy me. Early on, there was a naivete to them. As if blue states and cities could simply send a resignation letter to the White House and that would be that. I also felt a sting for those who would be left behind, starting with my own family living in red states. But now that Trump has sent troops to occupy multiple US Cities, and ICE terrorizes our communities daily, I think there’s more of an awareness of what that would actually mean. It’s also clear that governors and attorneys general in blue states can see the writing on the wall too, and know things are coming to a head.
Eventually, the dam will break. It has to. At least half of the country is exhausted by living like this, and coming to the realization that Trump voters aren’t going to come to their senses. Collectively, we’re sick of this coalition having this much control over our lives and seeking even more control. MAGA’s appetite for domination will never be satisfied. This isn’t sustainable, and the more the Trump Regime breaks, the clearer that should be to all of us. Personally, I’ve never been more open to blue states, cities, and citizens finding new ways to wield our power against the Trump Regime.
What comes next? In her essay, Cottom suggests that we’ll need to essentially start over, saying, “Our power isn’t in making one of the choices that are presented to us. Our power is in shaping the choices available to us.” It won’t surprise you that I agree with her conclusion. Voting, boycotts, protests -- none of these things will be enough. Not that we should stop doing any of those things, just that we have to reconsider what’s possible and develop new ways to get there.
The good news is that the Trump Regime keeps overplaying its hand. This is reflected in the polling, where Trump is deeply unpopular and his party is blamed for the shutdown. Powerful institutions might still feel they have less to lose by capitulating, but ordinary Americans have no incentive to continue this way. And the more Trump and his cronies break, the more glee they express at our collective pain, the more incentivized Democratic elected officials and voters will be to engage in less conventional, more radical approaches.
That doesn’t mean we’ve won or that winning will be easy. But with collective action and will, I believe that anything is possible. If Trump has broken America, we can take it back from his grasp and rebuild something better in its place.
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No one knows what we must do, but only that it's not what we once thought it would be. So we keep trying new things until one sticks more than the previous, and then another
The key is that more and more people, including those who voted for Trump, are being hurt by him and his fascist, foolish regime. They will not accept this. A large majority does not approve of many of his actions and something will happen before long to change where the reins of power are being held. In the meantime, let's organize to completely defund Twitter, Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Tall order, but possible if we unite.