Jonathan P. Baird

Back in 2017, in what was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 at a music festival held on the Las Vegas Strip. The gunman who was perched on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel had 14 rifles outfitted with bump stocks. He had smuggled them into his hotel room. He knocked out windows and started firing. Bump stocks can allow rifles to fire up to 800 rounds per minute..

The Las Vegas shooter rattled off over 1000 bullets in the eleven minutes of his deadly shooting spree before he killed himself. The motive for the shooting remains undetermined.

In June, we had the U.S. Supreme Court rule 6-3 in Garland v Cargill that regulations put in place to protect the public from these lethal killing machines could not stand. This was not a Second Amendment case. It was rather a question of statutory interpretation of the regulation drafted after careful study by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

After the Las Vegas shooting, former President Donald Trump had asked the ATF to propose the new regulation banning bump stocks. In December 2018, the ATF presented the regulation which went into effect in March 2019. The legal question in the case was whether rifles with bump stock attachments are machine guns.

Machine guns are banned under the 1934 National Firearms Act. The law goes back to a time when the government concern was stopping Mafia gangsters who were using machine guns in the commission of their crimes.

A bump stock is a replacement shoulder attachment for semiautomatic rifles especially AR and AK-style rifles that harness the recoil from firing to allow a shooter to fire shots in rapid succession. The federal government which had promoted the regulations argued that accessories like bump stocks convert semiautomatic rifles into machine guns.

It is easy to get lost in the intricacies of guns when looking at this case and that is what Justice Clarence Thomas does in his majority opinion. He put in pictures of firing mechanisms in his opinion. Thomas, however, along with the Court majority, entirely misses the forest for the trees.

Classifying bump stocks as not machine guns is obviously wrong. Look at the Las Vegas shooter. The reason he could kill so many so quickly was because of the bump stocks. The Supreme Court majority misses the purpose of the law which was to keep such guns out of the hands of people like that shooter. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the dissent, was not buying the majority reasoning. To quote her:

“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”

There is an absolute out-of-touchness about this Supreme Court. It is like justices are cocooned in their privileged world far removed from common people. As you read this, Justice Thomas may be on a yacht provided by his billionaire buddy and benefactor Harlan Crow. The justices are so insulated from gun violence and the consequences of their decision.

In this last week, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued a public health advisory on gun violence. He said:

“Firearm violence is an urgent public health issue that has led to loss of life, unimaginable pain and profound grief for far too many Americans.”

In 2020, gun violence became the leading cause of death among U.S. children and adolescents. The firearm mortality rate among youths in the U.S. is 11 times higher than in France, 36 times higher than in Germany and 121 times higher than in Japan. The rate of firearm-related deaths have been steadily rising. Whether in a school, a movie theater or any place where people are congregating, gun violence is far too-often a surprise unwanted intruder.

What is crazy about the Court’s bump stock decision is that the regulation at issue could not be more common sense. It was a response to the Las Vegas shooting. It should have been an easy lay-up.

Justice Thomas’s opinion is a ridiculous result. The law is already far too lax on any gun control reform but the Court evinces no concern about the toll taken. Such opinions will only create disrespect for the Supreme Court because they are undermining public safety. The Court is making it easier for deranged people to gain access to weapons that have no purpose beyond mass murder. Why does any civilian need a bump stock?

It is likely that the Court’s decision will open the door to other gun accessories like forced-reset triggers that allow shooters to fire more than 900 rounds in a minute.with one continuous trigger squeeze. The result is very in keeping with the Court’s posture around administrative agencies. ATF’s regulation got no deference. The Court is replacing agency expertise with a judicial power grab.

While the American public is focused on the presidential race, the big wildly undercovered story is how the Supreme Court has been usurping power for itself at the expense of the other two branches of government. It is the far right project of deconstructing the administrative state. Not allowing the regulation of bump stocks is part of that story.

Whoever the president is, the Court is making itself an obstacle to any progressive change whether it is guns, voting rights, the environment, women’s rights, consumer rights or health care. For many years conservatives whined about the activism of the Warren Court. What is going on with the Roberts court is of an entirely different dimension. Forget stare decisis, forget any effort to achieve the narrowest rulings: this Court is results-driven to achieve the maximum far right Federalist Society vision.

If I was going to offer a motto for the Roberts court it would be “Love the billionaire, hate the homeless”.

For any critic of the Supreme Court, there are too many major cases to respond to substantively which are piled up at the end of the term. The bump stock case is representative of the lack of concern for the public interest evinced by the Court majority. The Court belittles an urgent threat to the American public. Their decision will end up costing many lives.

We just passed the Juneteenth holiday and although it may be the holiday with the coolest name I don’t think the history behind the holiday is well known or well understood. I would argue it is one of our most important holidays because it is a celebration of freedom for all Americans. It represents a turning point in the historical battle to transform America into a place where slavery and its residual legacy are not acceptable.

Back on June 19, 1865, news of emancipation reached the enslaved people in Texas. Union general Gordon Granger stood on a balcony in Galveston, Texas and read the order that announced slavery was over. All slaves were free. This was more than two years after President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Confederate soldiers in Texas actually continued to fight in May 1865 even after General Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia in April.

You might wonder: how come there were so many enslaved people in Texas and how come they did not know about the Emancipation Proclamation? Texas was one of the eleven Confederate states and it was a slave state.

Settlers brought enslaved people to Texas to exploit them. They wanted to create a cotton-based slave economy like those in the other Southern states that had proved to be enormously profitable. After taking land from Native Americans, the settlers needed the labor of slaves to clear forests, tend the land and plant crops. That work was seen to be too onerous for the settlers but appropriate for the enslaved.

Texas had ignored the Emancipation Proclamation which applied to all the Confederate states. Even after the Confederacy lost the Civil War, slave owners didn’t share that news with their slaves. They tried to keep the exploitation going as long as possible.

In spite of Texans’ braggadocio and their tendency toward self-praise because of its size, Texas has a dark history. During the Civil War, slaveowners who feared the advance of Union troops, moved west to Texas with their slaves to what they perceived as a relative safe zone for slavery. Historians have estimated 150,000 as the number of slaves removed to Texas from Louisiana and Mississippi. Ishmael Reed writes:

“After the invasion of Pennsylvania in the American Civil War, the Confederates, mounted on horseback, marched children and their parents back to slavery, whether they were free or fugitive slaves.”

Maybe no war in American history needs more re-interpretation than the U.S. intervention in Mexico in the 1840’s. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829 when Texas was still part of that country. White slaveholding immigrants fought for independence and formed the Republic of Texas in 1836. They made slavery legal and it continued to be legal when Texas became a state in 1845.

The Texas Constitution actually forbid the immigration of free Black people and no free person of African descent was permitted to reside permanently in Texas.

The battle of the Alamo in 1836 played a prominent role in Texas history. It is part of Texans’ heroic origin story but critical facts are avoided. Although Mexican General Santa Anna is depicted as a villain, it was the Mexicans who opposed slavery – not the defenders of the Alamo.

The U.S. invasion of Mexico was essentially an imperialist land grab. Many future Confederate leaders and generals including Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were part of the invasion force. The U.S. President James Polk, our 11th president, was a slaveowner who sought the annexation of Texas and he wanted to expand slavery to Mexico. While he was president, Polk bought 19 enslaved people (13 were children) and he sent them to work on his Mississippi plantation.

It is little known that there was an Underground Railroad that went south to Mexico. Almost all accounts described the Underground Railroad as a northern trek to free states or Canada but there was a Southern route too that went to Mexico.

An estimated 5000 to 10000 enslaved people escaped from bondage into Mexico. Researchers say some went on foot, others rode horses and others snuck aboard ferries bound for Mexican ports. Because Mexico didn’t recognize slavery, it refused to return escaped slaves. Maria Hammock, a historian who is writing a dissertation on the southern route Underground Railroad writes:

“There were clandestine routes and if you got caught you would be killed and lynched, so most people didn’t leave a lot of records.”

Juneteenth needs to be understood in the context of the continuing battle not just against slavery but for equality. When General Gordon Granger stated in his order “all slaves are free”, he also stated:

“This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”

Nothing could have been more antithetical to the Confederate vision which was rooted in white supremacy. In spite of Juneteenth and the passage of the 13th Amendment, some enslavers remained unreconciled to the change and they continued to make their former slaves work for no pay. They used threats of violence as enforcement.

Former Confederates did not stop resisting after the Civil War. They tried to glamorize their history with the Lost Cause mythology and then they created a monstrous Jim Crow system. Donald Trump has kind words for General Robert E. Lee and Confederate monuments but that sympathy is entirely undeserved.

Juneteenth is about a vision of freedom for all Americans. It is a recognition of genuine progress and, as such, it is one of our most worthy holidays. Many holidays now seem like only an excuse for a three day weekend. That is not the case with Juneteenth.

Probably there is no more famous novel in American literature than Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So it is an event that there is an audacious new novel, James, by Percival Everett, that recreates Huck’s story from the point of view of Jim, the slave.

James forces a reckoning with perspective. Who is telling the story can be a game-changer and James does not disappoint. The novel seems especially pertinent now as America faces its illiberal tradition in the form of the MAGA movement.

In reading James, I was struck by how we have buried the story of early American history. Sure, we know about George Washington, the Founders, the revolutionary war and the Constitution but what about those who were out of the limelight? How did the slaves in New England fare? What was it like to live in New England as an enslaved person before there was an abolitionist movement?

Research quickly led me to the name, Quock Walker, a name that was entirely unfamiliar to me. Walker was born in Massachusetts in 1753. His parents were believed to be Ghanian.

African slaves had first arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630’s and slavery was legally sanctioned in 1641. Massachusetts was the first colony in New England to formally authorize the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and slavery remained legal for over 140 years. Boston’s wealthy white elite was thoroughly integrated into the lucrative enslavement-based economy.

Enslavers trafficked indigenous people abducted from the Massachusetts area, sold them into slavery in the Caribbean and returned with kidnapped Africans. Boston was a major site of trafficking. The city’s engagement with the slave trade peaked between 1760 and 1775.

Even early in American history some colonists recognized the inconsistency of arguing for “freedom” and “rights” while owning slaves. The contradiction was not lost on enslaved African Americans. The slaves themselves helped initiate the first mobilization in the Atlantic world against slavery.

Quock Walker was one of eight enslaved men of African descent who petitioned the Massachusetts General Court in early 1777.

They wrote in the name of “ A Great Number of Blacks detained in a State of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country”. They went on to say they had been “unjustly Dragged by the hand of a cruel Power from their Dearest friends and some of them even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents and brought here either to be sold like Beast of Burden and were then condemned to Slavery for Life”.

Their petition explained that they had sent “petition after petition to the Legislative Body of the State” but their petition had never been considered. They were ignored. In her book, The Slave’s Cause, by Manisha Sinha, the Quock Walker story is told.

In 1781, represented by two prominent attorneys, Quock Walker sued in Worcester County Court for his freedom,. Walker and both his parents had been purchased by James Caldwell. At the time of purchase Walker was an infant. Later in his life, Caldwell promised Quock Walker his freedom at age 25. After Caldwell’s death, his widow remarried and neither the widow nor her new husband, Nathaniel Jennison, wanted to free Walker. They decided to keep him enslaved.

Walker deserted his owners and began working for John and Seth Caldwell, either children or siblings of James Caldwell. Jennison recaptured Walker, severely beat and imprisoned him. Walker then sued Jennison both for his freedom and damages. Walker argued that slavery was contrary to Massachusetts’ newly ratified state constitution. Article One states:

“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and inalienable rights [including] the right of enjoying their lives and liberties.”

The jury found Walker was “a freeman and not the proper Negro slave” of Jennison and awarded Walker 50 pounds in damages. Jennison appealed and sued the Caldwells. The case went to the Supreme Judicial Court and Jennison lost again.

There was a further case against Jennison for assault and battery. Judge William Cushing who would later serve as one of the first justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, charged the jury that ”the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude and sell and treat them as we do horses and cattle was simply a usage bequeathed by European nations in pursuit of trade and wealth”.

In America, “a different idea has taken place…more favorable to the natural rights of mankind”. Slavery, he declared, was inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.

Quock Walker’s case is generally credited with abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. It was one of the first times in American history that a written constitution was directly applied as law.

Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, the first state to do so. Rhode Island and Connecticut adopted a plan of gradual emancipation in 1784 although Rhode Island did not ban slavery until 1843. Connecticut followed, banning slavery in 1848. New Hampshire passed an abolition bill in 1857.

Although Congress abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, Boston slave traders surreptitiously trafficked Africans for decades after that. In one well-known episode in 1858, traffickers aboard the ship Crimea departed from Boston to Africa, where they kidnapped 600 people from the mouth of the Congo River and sold them in Guanimar, Cuba. Wealth created by the slave trade and its related industries – rum, timber, shipbuilding, fisheries and agriculture – was foundational to Boston’s economy.

Still, Quock Walker’s case made an important difference. By 1790, the U.S. census recorded no enslaved people living in Massachusetts. Slavery was driven underground. Massachusetts was the first state to achieve that. White Bostonians continued to enforce strict racial segregation and racially discriminatory laws but not in the context of slavery.

In 2022, Massachusetts passed a law declaring July 8 Quock Walker Day. It is also called Massachusetts Emancipation Day. In 2023, it became a statewide holiday.

The collective freakout of the Republican Party leadership after the criminal conviction of their cult leader, Donald Trump, was predictable. They appeared to be in a state of disbelief when a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The disbelief quickly transformed into anger but it did not change the fact Donald Trump, the Party’s nominee for President, is now a convicted felon.

Still, the reactions have been extreme with Republican leader after Republican leader denouncing the trial as “banana republic” justice. Mike Johnson, Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Byron Donalds all performed for their leader. It looked like a requirement in Trump’s vice-presidential sweepstakes was to show a requisite amount of outrage while bizarrely dressing up like the leader when they went to the trial. That was showing fealty to the boss.

Nothing changes the fact that Judge Juan Merchan was an eminently fair jurist. He made evidentiary rulings that went both ways. He conducted the trial in a dignified and restrained way. Although he was repeatedly challenged by behavior that elicited 10 contempts, the judge’s demeanor remained impeccable throughout the trial.

No one knows in advance what a jury will find. Before the verdict, many commentators predicted a hung jury. They repeatedly said all it takes is one juror to hold out. It would appear the jury was persuaded by the strength of the prosecution’s case. They presented over 20 witnesses and they bolstered the case with a wealth of documentary evidence.

The defense presented one witness who failed to help Trump’s side of the case. As was his right, defendant Trump decided not to testify but he had every opportunity to do so. Back in April, he had said he “absolutely” would testify. It is a safe bet that his lawyers wisely advised him not to risk cross-examination and, for once, he listened. Still, the deeper problem for the defense was that it had no coherent theory of the case. It ended up taking pot shots at weaknesses in the prosecution case.

Without evidence, Trump said the trial was “corrupt”, the judge was “conflicted”, the jury was “rigged” and he called it a “disgrace”. He claimed President Biden was responsible for his prosecution. It needs to be pointed out that state prosecutors like Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor in this case, are not appointed by anyone connected to the federal government. New York elects attorney generals and Bragg was elected Manhattan DA in 2021. Biden had nothing to do with the New York state prosecution.

Convicted felon Trump trafficks in empty hyperbole where everything is a “scam”, a “hoax”, or a “witchhunt”. It is a tired playbook. Behind the verbiage is no evidence supporting his claims. Notice that when Trump talks about his trial being rigged, he never offers specifics. He has frequently been comparing himself to Al Capone which is telling. When Trump says the trial was election interference, he moves to a rhetorical level beyond the facts of his case.

What has been shocking in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction has been the Republican all-out attack on the legitimacy of the courts. They have moved from the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen to a Big Lie about the justice system being rigged. They can’t handle the truth that Trump was fairly convicted by a jury of his peers, twelve independent private citizens.

The danger in discrediting courts cuts deep. Republicans are undermining the rule of law.

Since the verdict, many responses on the Republican side have been unhinged. Trump initially reacted, saying Judge Merchan was from Colombia, as if that meant anything. He didn’t point out that his favorite judge, Aileen Cannon, was also born in Colombia. House Speaker Johnson called on the Supreme Court, even without jurisdiction, to “step in” and overturn the jury verdict. Former Trump aides Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon (also heading to prison) have argued for revenge prosecutions against Democrats.

Far right influencer and close Trump ally Laura Loomer has called for executing Democrats, not just locking them up. Trump himself has demanded that members of the January 6 Committee be prosecuted.

Part of the transformation of the Republican Party into an intolerant amalgam of authoritarians is their escalation of reaction. They are saying Trump can never be found guilty of any crime and that a trial is only fair if Trump wins. That is like the definition of being unassailable. Not surprisingly, Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who is touted as a potential Trump chief of staff, talks about post-constitutional government..

They are not simply disagreeing with Judge Merchan or the jury. There was a reason for jury anonymity. Too many Republicans are resorting to threatening perceived opponents. Think about the pattern of harassment against Ruby Freeman, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Sen. Jon Tester. There has been a tidal wave of threats against public servants in the last few years.

In appreciating the New York trial, it must be noted that this looks like the only case that will be heard before the November election and that is too bad. The New York case had been widely seen as the weakest case of the four pending against Trump. The American people deserve to know the outcome of all these cases before the election. They are relevant to whether Trump’s candidacy should even continue.

Rachel Maddow, in her book Prequel, compares the effort to prosecute Trump to the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. Back then, a number of Republican congressmen were allowing Nazi propaganda to be disseminated through their offices. They worked closely with George Sylvester Viereck, a German-American Nazi propagandist and agent. Viereck used congressional franking privileges of two senators.

The federal government tried 30 defendants for sedition. Maddow shows how political pressure from powerful people undermined the prosecution. During the course of the case, two very effective prosecutors were removed from pursuing the cases by their superiors.

Tha parallel to the multi-pronged effort by Georgia Republicans to remove prosecutor Fani Willis from Trump’s Georgia prosecution could not be clearer. The Georgia case is strong so it has to be stopped. The two federal cases are also strong so they also must at least be delayed. A helping hand from the Supreme Court majority and a Trump-appointed, in-the-bag judge make bad things go away and advances Trump’s re-election possibilities.

Saying the trial was a lie is consistent with Trump saying the election was a lie. In Trump mythology, he cannot lose. Do not be surprised if soon you will hear Trump say he did not lose the New York trial. In Trump world, truth is whatever he says it is.

No one had expected the Supreme Court would decide the 2024 presidential race. Joe Biden had won the popular vote by over 10 million votes but the tally in the key battleground states made the race too close to call. Trump held a slight lead in the Electoral College. Trump lawyers had argued that vote counts had to be stopped in the swing states because of questions around the validity of mail-in ballots.

To the surprise of everyone, the Supreme Court stopped the vote count, handing the election to Trump. He thanked “his justices”. Again, like they did in Bush v Gore in 2000, the Court majority said its opinion in Trump v Biden had no precedental value.

Trump watchers were surprised by his first moves. Although revenge and victimhood were his constant campaign themes, ordering the arrest of Joe Biden wasn’t written down in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump said that Biden had ordered his murder in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for national security documents.

Trump also ordered his Department of Justice to prosecute Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis and Judge Juan Merchan. He further ordered the arrest and prosecution of leading liberal and progressive activists and legislators who had opposed him. He described them as “Antifa”.

With an assist from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, he shot his opponents into space to live in a new space station prison colony. Musk had started a new business focusing on incarceration of “high value” inmates. The Trump-Musk alliance was mutually beneficial.

Trump created a new cabinet position for the Department of Billionaire Well-Being premised on the idea that if billionaires are doing well, we all are. Following their recommendations, Trump gutted the IRS and entirely removed any tax burden on billionaires and large corporations. Wall Street was ecstatic.

Less surprisingly, Trump pardoned all of the January 6 insurrectionists who had been convicted during the Biden presidency. Trump called them “patriots who had been wrongly prosecuted”. He got Congress to create a new national holiday on January 6 to honor the memory of Ashli Babbitt.

He also dismissed all remaining criminal and civil charges lodged against him and granted himself a complete pardon from all crimes. The Supreme Court concurred with his assertion of presidential power.

A flurry of Executive Orders accompanied Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment had protected birthright citizenship, Trump issued an Executive Order to reverse that. He imposed a new Muslim ban and he re-instituted his family separation policy; he removed protection from DACA recipients allowing for their immediate deportation and he closed the Southern border.

Many people had thought deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants was a logistical impossibility. Trump had promised he would pursue “the largest domestic deportation operation in history”. Requisitioning National Guard troops from red states and deploying them in blue states to round up immigrants was at first seen as an outrage until the Supreme Court gave its okay.

It was shocking to see people in big Democratic-leaning cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles dragged out of their homes after their doors were battered down. Even more shocking was to see those people removed to detention camps.

There were so many people detained that warehouses and abandoned malls were used to hold those rounded-up. There were many reports that among those rounded-up were black and brown-skinned Latinos who claimed to be U.S. citizens. That could not be verified but it was very similar to what happened in the Eisenhower Administration’s Operation Wetback in the 1950’s.

The Trump administration built large-scale staging areas near the Southern border in Texas. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott helped out providing endless amounts of razor wire. Using near-constant flights, the administration flew millions out of the United States. Under new expedited rules that made asylum claims impossible, masses of people were removed from the United States quickly. Due process no longer required any hearing before an immigration judge.

With so many of his former foes incarcerated in space or living in fear of arrest, Trump followed through on a range of domestic goals. Reviving the 19th century Comstock Act, his administration was able to get the High Court to outlaw abortion nation-wide with no exceptions. They also passed federal legislation applying the death penalty to abortion providers and abortion patients who sought to terminate their pregnancies.

In 2026, the Supreme Court majority reversed the decision legalizing gay marriage. In an opinion by Justice Alito, the Court noted that the Founding Fathers included no mention of gay marriage in the Constitution. Rolling back LGBTQ rights and trying to push people back into the closet remained a continuing Christian Right goal as they believed homosexuals were diseased and could be cured by a combination of religious indoctrination and psychological counseling,

Trump’s Christian Right supporters were thrilled when Trump used an Executive Order in 2027 to declare America a Christian nation. Trump declared that the Founders never intended a separation of church and state. It was something to see pictures of a white Jesus on postage stamps and to see the 10 Commandments mandated on the walls of public schools and colleges.

A national book ban was promulgated for schools. Books deemed “unpatriotic” or “lewd” were removed from school libraries and burned before crowds of cheering MAGA supporters. No more teaching of, among others, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, A Handmaid’s Tale and Gender Queer. An effort was successfully undertaken to restore Confederate monuments in the South.

The federal government removed all mention of the words diversity, equity and inclusion as part of its anti-wokeness campaign. Also the Environmental Protection Agency purged all mention of the words “climate change” and “global warming” from its website and publications. The administration’s mantra was “Drill baby drill” and every effort was undertaken to promote fossil fuels and to discourage alternative energy. The years 2027 and 2028 were the hottest in recorded history.

Male supremacists in the Trump administration advanced an understanding that a central problem in American life was the women’s liberation movement and they advocated that women’s role is to be a wife and mother. They discouraged careers for women and pushed to take away women’s right to vote which had been guaranteed under the 19th amendment.

On foreign policy, Trump withdrew the United States from NATO and formed a new alliance of autocrats popularly known as the Fascist International. It included Trump and his allies Putin, Kim Jong Un, Orban, Erdogan and Modi. In a major change of nuclear policy, Trump moved to support the use of what he called “low-yield” nuclear weapons. After Trump’s election and with his support, Putin used a “small” nuke in Ukraine and it quickly brought the Ukrainians to the bargaining table.

Back in 2024, people said that the presidential election would be the most important election ever. Most did not pay attention. Trump had joked for years about running for a third term. In 2027 he announced he was running again even though the 22nd amendment forbid it. Having arrested all the most likely Democratic candidates, Trump’s odds looked better and better. In 2028, Trump announced that he planned to run again in 2032.