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Nan Levinson, It Can’t Happen Here (or Can It?)

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It’s a distinctly strange — in fact, that’s far too mild a word for it — moment in these (dis-)United States of America. Donald Trump is in power (big time) and his buddy (until he’s not) Elon Musk is going wild, trying to fire government employees en masse while attempting to shut down or wreck government agencies. The two of them are also remarkably hard at work wiping out any government effort to stop this planet from heating to the boiling point. Yet, while all this has been happening, it almost seems as if the Democrats haven’t been there.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions, including (of course, again!) Bernie Sanders, who has been traveling the country on a National Tour to Fight Oligarchy, trying to whip up opposition to the Trumpian nightmare; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a few lesser-known congressional representatives like Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico who have indeed been speaking out. And given what’s happening, I suspect a lot more Democrats could be up and yakking soon.

Sadly, though, despite some growing demonstrations, it’s been all too quiet in the already disastrous second term of You Know Exactly Whom, even if he seems to be preparing the way, once all those tariffs go into effect, along with a series of tax breaks for billionaires that Republicans in Congress are eager to pass, for Americans who aren’t billionaires to start paying through the nose, for the economy to plummet (as it undoubtedly will), and for the Democrats to retake Congress almost two years from now, even as the president revs up for — yes, it would be historic (in the worst sense imaginable) — a possible third term in office.

Yikes! In the context of all that (and possibly the longest single sentence paragraph I’ve ever written), let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson explore how indeed it might be possible to disrupt the Great Disrupter sooner rather than later. Tom

How to Resist This Fresh Hell

Withholding Consent from the Trump Regime

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Not even two months since Inauguration Day and it’s already been quite a trip. Ping-ponging between vindictive pettiness and unconstitutional overreach while using everything in his power (and much that isn't), Donald Trump has served up a goulash of dubious orders with a slathering of venom on top. He's been abetted in the upheaval he promised on the campaign trail by the richest man on Earth, a cabal of lickspittles, and a cabinet filled with people who appear to have answered job ads stipulating, “Only the unqualified may apply.” As it became clearer what the battles to come would be, a friend wrote me: “I feel now like we're watching it all happen. It being that thing that can't happen here.”

There would be something strangely exhilarating about the frenzy of activity in Washington, if only it weren’t so careless, mean, dishonest, and destructive. Some of the most egregious actions have indeed been temporarily halted by the courts, but there’s no guarantee that trend will hold up -- if, of course, Donald Trump and crew even pay attention to court decisions -- especially when cases arrive at what's potentially "his" Supreme Court. Meanwhile, insidious ideological purges encourage citizens to rat out their neighbors and coworkers, as leaders of industry, the media, and other institutions rush to appease the president before he dissolves into a hissy fit of revenge. (The speed with which many corporations complied with the order to axe DEI programs illuminates how shallow their commitment to that effort really was.)

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Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Setting Up the Machinery of Mass Deportation

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It’s rare for me to say that I could see it coming. Still, on Donald Trump’s decision to use the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in his mad campaign to take the very words “immigrant” and “immigration” out of the American lexicon, I must admit that I did exactly that. When TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, who has followed Guantánamo’s now-infamous offshore prison of injustice since the early years of the Global War on Terror, sent in her latest update on the subject (just as the second Trump presidency was about to begin), I had a sudden thought. I must have had a vague memory that, once upon a time, long, long ago that military base had indeed been used to hold Haitians trying to emigrate to the United States. And somehow it instantly occurred to me that this president might indeed use it again in just that way (or in a far worse fashion).

I began looking into the possibility and noted that, as far back as 2019, he had reportedly suggested that migrants to this country might be designated “enemy combatants,” which, I wrote, “would indeed prepare the way for sending them to Guantánamo.” Then I added:

“And here’s a (grim) thought to put with that: Donald Trump has sworn to deport nothing less than ‘millions‘ of immigrants now in the United States and has already threatened to visit economic devastation on countries that might refuse to take them back. But count on one thing: all of this won’t be faintly as easy as he imagines and it won’t surprise me at all if, at some point in his own war not on but of terror, he starts sending some immigrants to… yes, Guantánamo!”

I posted that piece about a week later on January 28th at TomDispatch and, lo and behold (!), within a day or so it was being reported that President Trump was indeed preparing to use that base for up to 30,000 immigrants. And indeed (again!), he’s already sent the first few hundred (Venezuelan) deportees there, before dispatching many of them back to their country on (very expensive) military flights. Meanwhile, ominously enough, Secretary of Offensiveness (oh, sorry, Defense) Pete Hegseth only recently visited the facility (where he was actually stationed as an Army lieutenant in 2004-2005) with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. Imagine that!

And now, let TomDispatch regular Michael Gould-Wartofsky take you deep into what he terms “an all-American nightmare” at Guantánamo and, all too sadly, elsewhere across this country. Tom

An All-American Nightmare

How to Build a Deportation Machine in the Age of Trump

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“Flights to Guantánamo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland.”

With those words the U.S. government announced the fate awaiting “criminal aliens” in its custody.

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Frida Berrigan, Living in Red-Card America

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Today, in dealing with Donald Trump’s horrific, increasingly militarized actions toward migrants in this country, TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan reminds us that, at some point in the past (if you leave aside Native Americans), we all came from somewhere (else). In this grim moment, that thought sent me searching through my old papers until I finally found an account my aunt Hilda wrote about her father, my grandfather, so many years ago. Her father, Moore (probably originally Moishe) Engelhardt, came from a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. And I thought today, as an introduction to Frida’s piece, I might offer a little evidence of where I “came from” once upon a time. Here’s how my aunt’s long account begins:

“Your great-grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money.  He often said that he had a German 50 cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship — way down below in steerage.  Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children, and for the first few months in America I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.

“I don’t know the whole story of his trip from somewhere near Lemberg [now Lviv in Ukraine] in Poland to Hamburg where he boarded the ship, but from the few things he told me about it, I gathered that it wasn’t easy. He worked at anything he could find to earn money for the trip, saving every penny he didn’t need for daily living.  I do know that it took him two years. His last job was as a scribe for a lawyer in Hamburg. There were no typewriters, but he had a beautiful handwriting, almost as perfect as printing.

“The reason for his trip to America at the early age of 14, besides the stories he had heard about gold in the streets of New York, was, as he told it, a strange one.”

And so, as she goes on to describe his experience, it indeed was. But let me stop there with my little personal reminder that, somewhere along the line, we all did indeed come from elsewhere, including, of course, Donald Trump, whose mother was an immigrant (not that he ever highlights that when he talks about immigrants). And with that in mind, let Berrigan take you into a world from hell that none of us should remain silent about. Tom

Courage Is Contagious

Moving from Fear to Action in a Disturbing World

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“It is pretty wild how you can make someone mad by just holding a sign,” my 18-year-old Ro told me, as an irate driver peeled out of the intersection, shaking both his middle fingers at us but managing not to hit us. Phew! 

Ro was right. It didn’t take much to turn a perpetually busy intersection in New London, Connecticut, into a discussion forum on presidential overreach, cruelty, and immigration politics -- with all the excesses, including those fingers, of the Age of Trump. In fact, all it took was four of us, four signs, and a little midday coordination. Oh, and some noise makers! Our signs said: “New London cares about our neighbors” and “ICE Not Welcome” and two versions of “Vecinos, no tienen que abrirle la puerta a ICE.” The translation: “Neighbors, you do not have to open the door to ICE.”

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