Jonathan P. Baird

In the last seven months, conventional thinking about American politics has been tested and it has proven inadequate to describe what is going on. All the cliches about three co-equal branches of government and checks and balances have not come close to describing and naming the Trump power drive. He has hollowed out federal agencies and largely gotten the okay from the U.S. Supreme Court while turning law enforcement into his private army.

Most alarming has been his calling out the National Guard first in Los Angeles and now in Washington DC. Trump said Washington DC has been overtaken by “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people”. Stephen Miller, his aide, said “DC was more violent than Baghdad”.

These allegations are entirely false, even ridiculous. According to the Justice Department’s own data from the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington DC recorded its lowest crime rates in over 30 years with a 20% decrease in total violent crimes compared to the previous year.

In both Los Angeles and Washington DC we have seen military troops meandering around cities with no mission. In his first term we saw him do something similar in Portland Oregon. Masked agents in unidentified vehicles pulled people off the street. Trump’s calling the troops out is a stunt, an attention-grabber and an obvious effort to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal but he is threatening to repeat this in other cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.

The point is partly about intimidation but it is also about laying the groundwork for more and worse. Trump is testing the American public to see if we will accept authoritarian rule. How the public reacts may well influence his next moves. If reaction is weak in his eyes, ratcheting up both the authoritarianism and his gangsterism is likely. He is using a manufactured crisis to justify a crackdown, the erosion of civil liberties and increased power for the Executive branch.

Trump is following a well-established authoritarian playbook of power consolidation. Becoming a dictator requires neutralization and submission of competing power centers. Trump had tried unsuccessfully to overturn an election and violently halt the counting of electoral votes. Now he is seeking to chip away at all institutional, legal and political constraints on his power. Too many universities, law firms, media companies and legislators have voluntarily capitulated with minimal fight back. As was clear at his inauguration, the billionaires are on board.

Neither the creation of a network of concentration camps nor the fact that thousands of immigrants are being wrongfully detained in horrible conditions without due process have roused enough Americans. It is summer and people prefer distraction and vacation (if they can get one) before fall reality hits.

What has to be a major concern is Trump using the bogus excuse of an invasion, a rebellion or a crime wave to institute martial law. He has raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That law could allow the use of active-duty military personnel to perform law enforcement duties inside the U.S.. Of course, there is no rebellion or invasion so the justification is entirely lacking.

Still we are talking about someone who spins webs of disinformation and facts that aren’t happening. Whatever he says, most of his followers will believe him.

The law is not on Trump’s side. The Posse Comitatus Act criminalizes the use of federal armed forces to conduct civilian law enforcement. The military mission of officers and soldiers is to defend the country against foreign enemies, not be a cop on the beat. There is a trial in California going on now where the state of California is raising the Posse Comitatus Act as grounds for why Trump’s actions are illegal.

California is also correctly arguing that Trump is violating the Tenth Amendment which reserves to the states all powers not expressly given to the federal government. Policing is typically a use of state and local power. Trump has shown no regard for state sovereignty.

This case will land at the U.S. Supreme Court like so many other Trump initiatives and it is impossible to have confidence in the majority of that entity. If Trump does declare a national emergency and martial law, I would expect him to suspend the Constitution.

At that point, all bets are off. Authoritarian leaders do not typically want to give up power. In so many countries like Russia and Turkey, they have proven difficult to dislodge. They often ignore legal limits on terms of office and find a way around that. Trump has joked about staying on. Just the profitability and his monetizing the presidency are factors that might lead him to want to stay on. He has plenty of other reasons too like possible prosecution for his own corruption. If he has suspended the Constitution, the 22nd Amendment which forbids more than two terms would carry no weight.

Among things Trump does care about, retribution would appear to matter and questions abound about how aggressively he would pursue vengeance. Would he jail Obama or Hillary Clinton or others like Jack Smith? Would he go after a much wider swath of opponents like fascists in other regimes have done? It is hard to know what goes on in that mind. We know he cares about winning the Nobel Peace Prize and getting his head on Mt Rushmore but what else is not clear.

In his first term, he famously wanted the military to shoot protesters in the leg after the George Floyd protests but he was stopped by sensible advisors like Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. With advisors like Pete Hegseth, Trump in 2025 might take a far more aggressive approach.

I fear that Trump is looking for his Reichstag fire moment where a protest or event he can dress up will give him a green light to demolish the democracy that remains. With such an excuse, he would cancel mid-term elections and possibly any future elections. He would say there is a national emergency of some kind no matter how incongruous that was.

The MAGA movement has multiple components including far right extremists, evangelical Christians and tech billionaires. All would stand behind an authoritarian takeover that marginalizes people of color, subjugates women and forces gay people back in the closet. Some evangelical Christians are currently advocating repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment which gave women the right to vote.

Sugarcoating and pretending there is no authoritarian threat could not be more dangerous. There has never been a greater need for American patriots who will stand up to fascism and fight back.

As a student of American history, I believe there are some very important heroes who have never received the acknowledgement and acclaim they deserve. Charles Sumner from Massachusetts is one of those heroes. If I was guessing I would estimate 95 out of 100 Americans have never heard of Sumner. It appears to be the fate of many 19th century protagonists, no matter how outstanding. They were famous long ago.

Along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Charles Sumner led the struggle for abolition of slavery in the United States. Both as a lawyer and as a U.S. Senator from 1852 to his death in 1874, Sumner steadfastly fought the Slave Power. His story is beautifully told in The Great Abolitionist, a 2024 biography by the historian Stephen Puleo.

Sumner was an unlikely hero. At the same time as he was ferociously principled, he was painfully shy, almost geeky. He was wealthy, intellectual and pretentious but his oratorical skills and his bravery were undeniable. He hung out with a high-powered literary crowd that included his best friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He experienced some awful tragedies in his life. At age 33, his sister, Mary, who was 22, died. They were very close and that death rocked him to his core. He married at age 55 to a much younger, beautiful woman. It didn’t end well. To call it disastrous would be entirely accurate.

Most historically well-known, Sumner was the victim of a vicious assault on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 22, 1856 by a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks. With a cane of gutta-percha, he repeatedly beat Sumner over the head, nearly killing him.

Sumner survived but it took him over three years to recover. The effects of the traumatic brain injury were life long. It’s likely as Puleo surmises that Sumner also had PTSD. For years he suffered severe headaches when he would re-enter the Senate. His condition improved whenever he left the Senate floor.

Brooks attacked Sumner because of an anti-slavery speech he made called “The Crime Against Kansas”. Brooks considered the speech a libel. In his speech, Sumner had singled out Brooks’ cousin Senator Andrew Butler for vicious criticism. Sumner was the most outspoken anti-slavery advocate in the Senate and that was true for Sumner’s entire tenure as a senator.

As Puleo wrote, from the Brooks perspective, “Sumner represented a dangerous group of Radical Republicans who threatened the South, its sense of order and its cherished institutions”.

Even before he became a U.S. Senator, Sumner had distinguished himself. 105 years before the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education which was decided in 1954, Sumner and an African American lawyer Robert Morris litigated Roberts v City of Boston. In that case, the plaintiffs argued against segregated schools.

It is not an exaggeration to say that in Brown, Thurgood Marshall made the same argument Sumner made in Roberts. Sumner lost then but the argument that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal did eventually win both in Brown and in the state of Massachusetts. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature forbade racial discrimination in schools, something that proved extremely difficult to prevent in practice.

To appreciate the greatness of Sumner, you have to recognize the minority status of abolitionism in the 1840’s. Abolitionists were not just hated – they were an absolutely despised fringe. Abolitionists were subject to physical assault, mob attacks and social ostracism. It was not until the mid-1850’s that the tide turned. The assault on Sumner elicited much sympathy and propelled the abolitionist movement. He became a revered figure in the North while becoming a pariah in the South.

Sumner had made his first major anti-slavery speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1845. He spoke against the admission of Texas into the nation as a slave-holding state. He turned on the ruling class of his time, including his own world of Boston high society, and he excoriated their accommodation with slavery. He spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Puleo wrote that Sumner was relentless in his view that American slavery was a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the laws of God.

When Abraham Lincoln became President, Sumner remained a close friend but he always pushed Lincoln toward the goals of equality and total emancipation for black people. Before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner consistently pressured Lincoln to free the slaves and to allow them to serve in the Union army. He did not want to re-admit the Confederate states to the Union after the Civil War unless they agreed to universal suffrage.

Sumner was way ahead of his time. Very ambitiously, he had wanted to re-make the South. He anticipated the voting rights problems which have bedeviled the Southern states since Reconstruction. Before he died, he worked on the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which President Ulysses Grant signed. The law forbade discrimination in public accommodations. In 1883, the Supreme Court largely reversed it but Sumner was correct in seeing the problem.

Sumner was integrally involved in passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery. He wanted it to be stronger than the version that passed. Congress repealed all fugitive slave acts, allowed “colored ” persons admission into railroad carriages and allowed “colored ” testimony in United States courts. Sumner had introduced all those measures. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Freedmens’ Bureau.

When Sumner died in 1874, his coffin was placed in the center of the Capitol rotunda and many thousands came to pay their respects. It was the first time in American history a senator was so honored. What was unique about Sumner was that he more resembled a revolutionary intellectual than a party politician.

With voting rights so threatened now and with an inert Congress, we could so use more brave and principled legislators like Charles Sumner.

It is a brutal time for Democrats. Wimpiness could be their brand. Polls have shown Democrats have their lowest favorability rating ever. Only a third of those questioned in a Wall Street Journal survey said they had a favorable view of the party. A July CNN poll put Democratic favorability at 29%. That is the lowest mark for Democrats in the entire history of CNN polling, going back 30 years. It is a 20 point drop since January 2021.

This is happening at a time when Donald Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet. CNN has his approval rating at 41% with 57% disapproval. CNN says Trump is down 7% points since February. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 37%.

You might think Trump’s unpopularity would translate into Democratic advance but that is not what has happened. Democrats have bottomed out. So the question must be asked: why are the Democrats viewed so unfavorably?

I know opinions vary widely among Democrats but I will offer one perspective as a frustrated progressive Democrat. The Democrats don’t know how to fight back and they fail to see what they are up against. They also don’t know how to message.

The Republicans are no longer a traditional conservative party. They have transformed into a fascist cult that doesn’t tolerate internal opposition.

Bullying, insulting and pathological lying are the Trump tools of trade learned at the knee of the fixer, Roy Cohn. For his treatment of those he disfavors, Trump resembles an emotional abuser. Name-calling and gaslighting are his favorite pastimes. Anything that casts him in an unflattering light is automatically dismissed as fake news. Trump’s firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, is a perfect example. Not liking what the statistics showed, he demands propaganda that presents the picture he wants.

Probably it is the Democrats” passivity in the face of the MAGA onslaught that is the most maddening. The weakness and quiet response of so many Democratiic leaders has the feel of acquiescence. They are getting punched in the face everyday and very few call it out. They normalize MAGA fascism.

While maybe it is not fair to cite a single vote, my NH Democratic senators, whom I respect, voted along with five other Democratic senators to support the Homeland Security Secretary nomination of Kristi Noem, the puppy slayer. I know there is such a thing as realpolitik but I don’t get that vote. It reflects the absence of any spirit of defiance. Unqualified capitulation like that gives MAGA more oxygen.

Whatever one’s stance on the Democratic side, whether moderate, liberal or left, we all should be on board with pushing back hard in street demonstrations, other protests, social media and in writing. To say we plan to turn the tables in the mid-term elections in November 2026 is a grossly inadequate response. It is too little too late. No one knows for sure if there will be normal elections then.

Democrats want strong fighters for our side. That is a big part of why Zorhan Mamdani captured the imagination of so many New Yorkers in the New York City mayoralty race. With both charm and fire, Mamdani captivated people. There has been little of that on the Democratic side. Mamdani embodied youth, charisma, integrity, authenticity and social media smarts with an FDR-like politics that was entirely oriented to the needs of the working class.

Mamdani ran on an affordability platform. He recognized the economic crisis facing the great majority. To me, his ideas were anything but radical. They were more like common sense measures to help around the increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Mamdani advocated lower rents, free buses, universal free child care and higher taxes on the ultra-rich.

In a new Gilded Age economy that is now only serving the 1%, he acknowledged the need for systemic change. The labor writer Hamilton Nolan has written:

“When reality becomes radical, moderates become fools. We are living through a lawless, dictatorial descent into autocracy and oligarchy.”

The Democratic gerontocracy needs to be replaced by a new generation of leaders. After the hellish defeat in 2024, it should have been obvious that the old leaders needed to go. Whatever contributions they made in the past, the threat we are facing calls for more combative leadership more connected to younger voters. The old leaders cannot turn out the youth vote which is critical to Democratic success.

Very respected Democratic pollster Celinda Lake has studied why six million Democratic voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. She found that many of the voters didn’t think the Democrats offered an alternative. The group of non-voters skewed younger with two-thirds under 50. These voters actively disliked Donald Trump. They were very tuned into social media. Some didn’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils and some were upset with the Democratic silence on Gaza but most wanted the Democrats to offer a genuine alternative on the economy and health care.

The Democrats need to give the people good reasons to vote. That means reforms that speak to immediate needs like housing and health care. Americans don’t want major cuts to essential programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps to fund billionaire tax cuts.

Many Democrats who are tied to corporate money have favored a mush message advocated by the Democratic consultant class. In the 2024 race the Democrats entirely failed to have a coherent message. That led to Donald Trump defining the issues.

There is no mystery in what could work for the Democrats but they have to get over their fear about having a strong message. As awful as the MAGA message of hate on immigrants and LGBTQ people is, they are not afraid to push absolutely debased positions .For Democrats, a mush message couched in fear is no way to fight fascism. Democrats need to call out fascism and not be afraid to name it. Nor should they fear calling to abolish ICE which is the military wing of our fascism. ICE is creating concentration camps.

It is the 1% versus the 99%. Back in 1936, FDR said about the rich: “ They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred”. I wish the Democrats today had one-tenth of FDR’s fighting spirit.

In the just-passed Trump budget bill, Congress allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. That represents a massive increase in detention spending. ICE is getting 13 years of current funding which has to be spent within 4 years. With this money, ICE becomes the largest domestic police force in the U.S..

This windfall gives the agency the money to tremendously expand jailing capacity. They plan to double detention beds and carceral space while hiring 10,000 new agents.

A police state requires material underpinnings and the money is now there for its establishment. The Trump regime is creating a new prison-industrial complex where many thousands will be detained in a national network of concentration camps. They will need to fill the beds and private prison companies have a financial incentive in making that happen.

No legislative or judicial body has put a stop or even a slow down to this emerging behemoth. The failure of checks and balances exemplified by both Congress and the Supreme Court’s acquiescence with Executive Branch overreach has allowed us to reach this point. The Trump regime has been wrongly using private data gathered from federal agencies like the IRS to confirm migrants’ home addresses.

The lines between federal, state and local law enforcement are getting blurred by the Trump regime as all are being recruited to carry out immigration enforcement. Law enforcement professionalism is being replaced by a fascist mentality steeped in xenophobia, sadism and hate. It is common to see ICE agents telling people they stop that they have no rights while demanding access to their devices.

ICE is also increasing its surveillance capacity. The Washington Post has reported that ICE is sharply increasing the number of immigrants they are shackling with GPS-enabled ankle monitors. The goal is to bypass due process, arrest huge numbers and fast track a high quota of immigrants out of the country.

The Department of Defense just awarded a Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics, a $1.26 billion contract to establish and operate a 5,000 bed short-term detention facility near the Mexican border at Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. It would be the largest such facility in the country.

Because they lack the capacity for the detention space they desire, the Trump regime is looking for detention space outside the world of already-existing prisons and jails. They are following the Project 2025 recommendation for the use of “low level temporary capacity (for example, tents) once permanent space is full”.

Alligator Alcatraz is the tent model in practice. Instead of jail structures with walls, floors and insulation, tents will cover chain-link cages crammed full with bunk beds and surrounded by barbed wire.

Fort Bliss is not the only military base where the Trump regime intends to place immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has told Congress that the Department of Homeland Security plans to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana for immigration detentions on a “temporary” basis. Trump himself has suggested that 30,000 immigrants could be detained at Guantanamo.

Considering the cruelty of the Trump regime, inhumane conditions for detainees are a reasonable expectation and Human Rights Watch has already released a report showing physical abuse, medical neglect and unsafe living conditions at three Florida detention facilities.

Human Rights Watch found officers at these facilities were often abusive to those being held. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. One man wrote in the report:

“We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”

One guard who worked at Alligator Alcatraz and quit after two weeks said:

“The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes, They give you bug spray but that still doesn’t help.”

The tents at Alligator Alcatraz are flood-prone and sewage back-ups have resulted in cages flooded with feces. Detainees have reported worms in their food. Authorities have been denying media access and have illegally limited Congress people from inspecting. They have not been allowing lawyers to meet with clients. This is a retreat from any constitutional standard.

The idea that these facilities are being set up to protect national security against an invasion is absurd. There is no invasion as the Southern border has been effectively sealed. Trump’s campaign against immigrants is targeted on folks in the interior U.S. and it is based on the Big Lie that immigrants are more likely to be murderers, rapists or violent perpetrators of crime.

U.S. born citizens are far more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants. Last year, U.S. Border Patrol arrested 17,000 criminal aliens. 29 were for homicide or manslaughter. 221 were for sex crimes. The overwhelming majority were for unlawful entry into the country. They became “criminals” for violation of civil immigration law.

The massive infrastructure being created is for people who have often lived in the U.S. for decades who have committed no crime. They are being scapegoated. They pose no threat to the American public. Many perform essential jobs in agriculture, construction and home care that others won’t do.They also include such evildoers as graduate students and activists who have dared to exercise First Amendment rights.

The whole enterprise of masked agents in unmarked vehicles using ruses and ploys to gain entry into homes to disappear immigrants and perceived opponents violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. Nothing could be more un-American than creating a police state.

Fortunately, such a state is not consolidated. Americans still have some civil liberties as well as some courts that don’t roll over. Resistance remains absolutely necessary however we can all do it. We did not defeat fascism in World War 2 to passively stand by and watch our rights evaporate less than 100 years later.

When the catastrophic flooding happened in Texas along the Guadalupe River, President Trump responded that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming” and that “this is a once-in-every 200 year deal”. Not to be outdone, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the Texas floods as a “1000-year event”.

What is striking about these responses is their lack of comprehension of climate science and climate change. Extreme floods and sea level rise have become almost routine. It makes you wonder if we have all been inhabiting the same planet. It is not like climate science is something new. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen persuasively presented the risks of climate change in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Since that time, an overwhelming international scientific consensus has supported and reinforced Hansen’s perspective

Global warming has made events like the Texas flood much more common and more extreme. I was struck by the similarities between the Texas flood and Hurricane Helene which devastated North Carolina last year. I also think of the 2023 floods in Vermont. However, instead of seeing the Texas disaster in the context of many other similar events, the Trump regime remains in climate denial.

Trump has called climate change “a hoax”. With his mantra of “drill baby drill”, his administration is actually committed to worsening global warming as quickly as possible. He has increased subsidies for fossil fuels. It is like they are trying to remove climate change out of existence by scrubbing out the words off government websites. Their motto could be: “backwards at warp speed”. It is like a death wish.

The Trump regime accepted no responsibility for the Texas flooding. They did not see the mass layoffs at Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or the National Weather Service as having anything to do with their lack of preparedness and the government’s inadequate and late response. At least 135 people died from the flood and 3 remain missing.

Since the Texas flood, there has been an assessment of blame going on. On July 3, the National Weather Service issued its first alert predicting rainfall totals of six inches in twelve hours. That initial forecast proved to be an underestimate. The National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio was missing both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.

The National Weather Service issued two more warnings early on July 4 but the warnings failed to get through to the residents who lived near the water. The water rose more than 25 feet in 2 hours. There was a lack of coordination between the National Weather Service and the locals. Kerr County Texas locals had tried to get FEMA funding for a flood warning system for years but the State of Texas had turned down the request.

In 2019, the owners of the girl’s camp, Camp Mystic, that suffered so many casualties, had performed a multi-million dollar renovation. For reasons that are unclear, the camp did not move its most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone. They built more cabins inside it.

Immediately after the flood, FEMA’s response was poor. Homeland Security Secretary Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue Teams until Monday July 7 more than three days after the flooding began. Normally FEMA would have been at the site of the flooding much sooner.

Also, almost inexplicably, Noem fired hundreds of contract workers at FEMA emergency centers on July 5, a day after the flooding started. On July 6 and 7, FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. Noem also had recently enacted a new cost-cutting scheme where she had to sign off personally on any expense over $100,000. Noem’s red tape delayed FEMA response time.

While politicians like Texas Governor Greg Abbott attempt to squirm out of responsibility by saying only losers try and understand to assess blame, if we, as a society, want to prevent more such events, understanding matters.

What is crazy is that the Trump regime is actively moving to disband federal agencies that help Americans cope with our ever-more frequent climate catastrophes. Trump has called for the elimination of FEMA “as it exists today” although he has gone back and forth on that. He cancelled a $4.5 billion program that helps protect hard-hit communities from flooding.

He plans to increase the amount of damage a storm has to do before the federal government will declare a disaster. This will make it harder for states to be eligible for federal assistance. This is consistent with his plan to send disaster relief back to states that lack the resources to do recovery.

The Trump regime’s response to climate is rooted in a hatred of science. The climate scientist, Andrew Dessler, has written:

“They hate science because it leads to regulation, so they want to do everything they can to stop science from being used to regulate.”

I think they also hate science because it is the ultimate woke discipline. Science is a repository of secular truths which conflicts with the conspiracy theories and religious beliefs that motivate so many MAGA followers.

Not only does the Trump regime want to dismantle federal agencies that respond to disasters, they want to purge our collective ability to understand climate and weather prediction.

They have fired hundreds of scientists who were working on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used to prepare endangered U.S.communities for extreme weather and sea-level rise. They also have taken apart the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35 year-old effort to track global climate change that was established by Congress.

The Trump plan will cause forecasting havoc and it will lead to needless death. They are looking to close the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Severe Storm Laboratory and the High-Impact Weather Research and Operation. Without question, reducing accurate and timely weather warnings endangers the public.

Humans are heating up the planet, melting the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect many more Texas-style disasters which I guess we are supposed to meet with an Alfred E. Neuman “what me worry” response. Disaster relief has become a passe concept.

It would be easy to think that the second Trump presidency is unlike any other period in American history but that is not the case. The second Trump presidency resembles the historical period after Reconstruction. In both periods the reality of racism was denied. White supremacists sought to regain political power after periods where people of color had made economic and political gains.

Our current period might be called the New Redemption. The original Redemption was the post-Reconstruction effort by the former slaveholders and their allies to oust the Radical Republicans and to restore white supremacy. Throughout the South, the Redeemers saw the Republicans of that era (who were the anti-racists then) as corrupt.

The Redeemers focused on cutting government spending. They eviscerated voter registration laws to strip Blacks of their ability to vote. They reduced support for public education which had been newly created under Reconstruction governments. Before Reconstruction, there was no interracial public education.

The Redeemers relied on the Supreme Court just as MAGA forces do now. In both cases, the Supreme Court indulged the denial of racism and support for the structural inequality which was racism’s trademark.

The 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson is well-known for its disgraceful “separate but equal” ruling but it was only one decision among a flurry of cases cementing the dominance of white supremacy. There are quite a few that deserve mention.

In 1883, the Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which had outlawed discrimination against Black people using public accommodations like hotels, theaters and railroads. When 10 of 11 Southern states passed new disenfranchising state constitutions, the Supreme Court went along. In the 1898 case of Williams v Mississippi and the 1903 Alabama case of Giles v Harris, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements which almost entirely removed Blacks and poor whites from the voting rolls.

Although Reconstruction had led to significant Black representation in southern state legislatures and in Congress, the Redeemers drastically changed the whole political landscape. Congress became completely white in 1901 and stayed that way until 1929.

The Southern oligarchy of the post-Reconstruction era used its economic power to organize the Klan and other terrorists to create slavery by another name. Former slaves were made into serfs. Lynchings stoked fear. The Southern ruling class brought back racist ideology cloaked in a scientific guise. They argued for the natural superiority of some races over others using Darwinian ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

There was a religious dimension to the 19th century Redeemers. They called the time “Redemption” because they saw the restoration of white supremacy and the imposition of racial segregation as correcting the sins of Reconstruction. Their Christianity was white supremacist.

In our era, backsliding on racism has been going on since the decline of the modern civil rights movement of the 1960’s-1970’s. Before the second Trump presidency there were notable reversals like the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder which weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in college admissions but Trump 2.0 has taken things to a new level of backwardness.

The war against DEI is a rebranding and a cover for the promotion of racism. In Trump world, diversity equals incompetence because only white men pass his meritocratic test. Any effort to rectify our history of racism is considered discrimination against white people. Trump’s many Executive Orders are all in that vein whether it is about repealing birthright citizenship, stopping the Department of Justice investigations into police misconduct against African Americans or pardoning vicious white supremacists who were part of his January 6 shock troops.

The Supreme Court has provided an ideological justification with its repeated arguments defending colorblindness, These arguments could have been made by 19th century Redeemers. Also both eras have their fervent evangelical backers who see promotion of white supremacy as a religious duty. One difference between the two Redemptions is that MAGA doesn’t rely on lynchings and the Klan but they don’t need to. They control all three branches of government.

Racism has been an essential part of American capitalism from the first seizure of Native American land and the enslavement of African Americans in the early 1600’s. The labor of slaves was an important source of the accumulated capital which fueled the takeoff of the U.S. economy in the first half of the 19th century. Taking land from Native Americans and Mexicans provided the territory for dynamic economic expansion.

Belief in the superiority of the white race developed, in large part, as a justification for these acts. They were done in the name of white America’s mission to civilize and control allegedly inferior people.

Where racism is concerned, the Trump regime is like a long-time alcoholic with a relapsing alcohol problem. They say they don’t have a problem but the evidence shows they are not stopping. Whatever they say, they keep drinking. Anti-racists of all races, religions and nationalities have a responsibility to raise awareness and oppose racism as forcefully as possible.

When Alligator Alcatraz opened this last week in the Florida Everglades, it provided a window into the future. MAGA wants to build many more of these concentration camps across America. Of course, this is not your typical concentration camp. It is a place where 3,000 people could be locked up indefinitely with no due process in an isolated swampland populated by alligators and pythons.

Donald Trump has long wanted to use alligators and snakes to keep immigrants from crossing the Southern border. In his first term, his former aide Miles Taylor said that Trump called Kirstjen Nielsen, his prior Homeland Security Secretary, to inquire into the possibility of stocking a 2000 mile moat along the Southern border with alligators and snakes. He was told it would be illegal.

There was delight in the MAGA world at the creation of Alligator Alcatraz. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem flew in to celebrate the opening. Trump said he wanted to see such camps in many states. FOX commentators joked about prisoners getting eaten by alligators. They said those being held would beg to be sent to El Salvador. They thought the location would be a fine place to deport home-grown American prisoners too.

The Republican Party of Florida was selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise You could get tee-shirts, hats and beer koozies. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wanted South Carolina to have its own Alligator Alcatraz. She posted:

“Dear DHS: We’ve got a swamp and a dream. Let’s talk. South Carolina’s gators are ready. And they’re not big on paperwork. If I was Governor, we’d be bringing Alligator Alcatraz to South Carolina.”

To say this is sick doesn’t express the degree of dehumanization in which MAGA world is indulging. They treat it as an amusement or entertainment but even the Nazis didn’t glorify their concentration camps. They tried to hide them. There is a loss of any sense of humanity celebrating a spectacle of cruelty and sadism.

If we step back, it is apparent that the mass deportations being carried out as well as those looming are being conducted entirely outside of the law. There is an extensive body of immigration law, particularly asylum law, being shelved in favor of speedy deportations with no due process.

People are not getting their day in court or any legal process. ICE picks up people and they disappear. No distinction is being made between those with meritorious asylum claims and these who don’t have such claims. Whether someone has deep roots in the U.S. and has lived here for decades is being ignored. Nor does it matter if any alleged crime committed was a 20 year ago minor traffic offense. Immigrants are being grossly stereotyped as “criminal aliens”.

Dehumanization makes this possible. Trump has called immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood of the nation”. When people are considered sub-human, crimes will be more likely to be committed against them. Hate becomes super-charged.

MAGA is following the authoritarian playbook. In the American case, brown-skinned immigrants are playing the role of the Jews. First you call them demeaning names. Then you treat them as less than human so you can do awful things to them. You don’t consider the circumstances that led them to seek refuge in the U.S..

One way that Alligator Alcatraz is an improper name is that the federal prisoners who were held on Alcatraz Island went through a court process and received due process. Now MAGA just categorizes those being deported as “the worst of the worst” even though it is more likely they committed no crime but were picked up in an ICE raid at a Home Depot or some other workplace. The public is supposed to trust the credibility of masked unidentified agents who disappear people like a Latin American death squad.

With the budget bill that just passed, Congress made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history with almost $75 billion provided for ICE detention and removal. This profligate spending feeds a prison-industrial complex that profits off of more bodies. Expect to see masses swept up by ICE gestapo. It is highly likely ICE will be mistakenly deporting many U.S. citizens who get wrongly caught up in their dragnet without needed identification.

One weird aspect of Alligator Alcatraz is that FEMA funds were used in its creation. It has been built at the start of hurricane season and officials say the tent city could withstand a category 2 hurricane. However, Florida has been more frequently seeing far bigger superstorms than that due to climate change. What will happen to prisoners if there is a category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane?

Not surprisingly, the Trump regime failed to follow environmental regulations in their haste to construct the camp. They did no environmental impact analysis, including sewage and water, and they didn’t give the public a chance to weigh in. Both environmental groups and Native American tribes oppose Alligator Alcatraz and have filed suit against it.

The camp is located in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Environmentalists in Florida have spent decades trying to protect the ecology there. The Seminole Tribe has ancestral ties to the land at issue. For cultural insensitivity and environmental cluelessness, the Trump regime is top dog.

The use of alligators against people of color is not a new thing. During slavery and in the Jim Crow era, African American babies were used as alligator bait. There is a historical resonance to what MAGA does now. It carries on racist tradition.

Alligator Alcatraz reminds me of an Allen Ginsberg poem, Birdbrain. The poem begins “Birdbrain runs the world…” It could have been written today.

Around the time of the No Kings demonstrations earlier in June, I saw the following sign on social media:

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their home. Families are torn apart…Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.” Anne Frank, 1943

What Anne Frank described is going on now. For anyone who has been paying attention to the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or as it is called ICE, they have been on an out-of-control rampage rounding up thousands of immigrants all over the United States. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has demanded that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day. It is called Operation At Large.

In the process of attempting to meet the quota, ICE has been creating an anti-democratic police state. ICE has entirely junked any concept of law or due process. There has been a race to arrest as many as possible as quickly as possible.

ICE and the Custom and Border Protection have been terrorizing Latino communities, especially. People are so terrified of the federal government they are afraid to leave their homes. This includes residents who have lived in the United States for decades. ICE has been turning formerly thriving business communities into ghost towns. People are afraid to go outside out of fear of an ICE kidnapping.

The lawlessness could not be more apparent. Masked, unidentified ICE goon squads in unmarked vehicles have been disappearing people from workplaces, churches, farms, street corners, high school volley ball practices as well as immediately after their citizenship hearings. The masking and lack of identification is an obvious problem particularly in light of the shootings of the Minnesota legislators by the guy who dressed up like a cop. How do those being detained even know if they are being taken away by any lawful authority?

Those taken are often removed to faraway concentration camps compromising any right to counsel. Just finding and reaching a detained person can take days. As we have seen, some of those gobbled up by ICE are next located in an unreachable gulag outside the country where they have been transported with no due process.

No longer is there any attempt to focus on those with alleged criminal records. Now the focus is on anyone with a brown skin, regardless of whether they have any criminal history. ICE wants to put them on a plane out of the country as soon as it is feasible. It doesn’t matter if the detained person is married to a U.S. citizen or has small children and is breast-feeding.

The Trump administration has ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases by denying asylum seekers a hearing. They have entirely short-circuited asylum law. The stories have been piling up of fast-tracked removals from the U.S. as well as stories of American citizens being improperly detained and even removed from the country.

ICE facilities throughout the country can accommodate 41,500 people but are currently holding more than 56,000. It is forgotten that being undocumented in the U.S. is a civil infraction, not a criminal offense. The Trump administration will never acknowledge that as it cuts against their demonization agenda.

This is all taking place before our eyes but no one has a full picture of what the ICE secret police force is up to. We can only see bits and pieces of their operations. ICE always says it is deporting “the worst of the worst” but invariably it is people who have lived in the U.S. for decades who have been contributing members of society. ICE data shows a staggering increase in the number of those arrested who have no track record of being charged with or convicted of a crime,

Trump’s budget bill includes $75 billion in supplemental funding for ICE, an enormous increase. He wants to deploy 10,000 more ICE agents to conduct more monstrous raids. ICE’s budget in 2024 was $9 billion. If the budget bill passes with the ICE increase, expect a tsunami of more deportations.

This is the gravest threat to civil liberties in my lifetime. The public reaction has not been commensurate with the threat. The No Kings demonstrations were tremendous but our institutions need to respond. The Democratic Party has failed to sound the alarm.

I would suggest we need a public investigation and hearings that thoroughly expose the actions of ICE. ICE operations are conducted in secrecy and they are hiding what they are doing from the public as much as possible. The Department of Homeland Security is imposing new limits on visits by members of Congress to immigration enforcement facilities.This is contrary to federal law which explicitly allows members of Congress to make unannounced oversight visits.

There are many questions that need to be answered: how many have been deported? What kind of process did they receive? Who is getting a hearing before an immigration judge? What are the living conditions of those being held in ICE detention? Are those being held getting adequate nutrition, living space and medical care? Are consent decrees the government previously agreed to such as those around family separation being adhered to? Why are ICE agents masked and why are they arresting people without a warrant? Is ICE doing racial profiling? How are they deciding who to detain and who to deport?
How many have died in ICE custody and under what circumstances? How many American citizens have been detained and how many have been deported? What were the circumstances in those cases and what steps were taken to protect U.S. citizens? What are the financial arrangements around ICE prisons and concentration camps? Is there a financial gain that is motivating an increase in the number of detentions?

If the Democrats in Congress cannot figure a way to investigate ICE, I think some kind of independent investigatory tribunal should be created to explore ICE’s many crimes. While it may not be the best analogy, I am old enough to remember the Russell Tribunal created in 1966 by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre to examine America’s war crimes in Vietnam. We need a tribunal like that to study and report on the Trump regime’s immigration-related crimes.

A tribunal featuring pubic hearings to increase public understanding would help the American public come to a better appreciation of how ICE is replacing due process with a system of repression. We must not passively sit by and watch rights being stripped away.

It is a horrifying commentary that many people are so afraid of the federal government that they are afraid to leave their home.

While it seems almost unbelievable to me, I knew Howard for over 35 years. When I started as a staff attorney at New Hampshire Legal Assistance in the late 1980’s, Howard worked as a vocational expert in the Manchester NH hearing office of Social Security Administration.

Back then, all hearings were in person and everyone, including vocational experts, appeared at the hearing. The Manchester hearing office had jurisdiction for both New Hampshire and Vermont. Hearings that I attended were held in Manchester, Littleton, White River Jct., Woodstock, Franconia and Brattleboro. I got to know Howard in hearings and in waiting rooms before the hearing. We both were talkers.

It was an entirely different cast of characters then. There was Judge Wilkin, Donnelly, Milne and Herman. Then there was Judge Harap, Hoban, Mason, Gormley, Fallon, Klingebiel and Kleinfeld. All these judges have either retired or passed away.

When I told Judge Paul Martin who has been Chief Judge in Manchester for a long time that Howard had died, he told me that Howard was “the gold standard in vocational experts”. I would agree with Paul’s assessment and I think that very high assessment of Howard’s professionalism was widely shared. Judges and lawyers were universally happy to have an expert of Howard’s high caliber.

Howard was always prepared. He could back up his opinions. He brought a wealth of experience to his job. He was eminently fair and he played it down the middle. I knew he had empathy for claimants but he took the job of being an impartial expert very seriously.

We had some funny experiences back in the old days. I remember doing hearings with Howard back in the Continental 93 Hotel in Littleton in their freezing conference rooms adjacent to the hotel. Witnesses testified through chattering teeth.

After I became an ALJ, Howard and I reconnected. He started doing hearings in my home office in Lawrence Mass. Instead of being the representative, I had the experience of working with him as the judge. Through the course of many hearings we got to know each other much better.

There are subtleties to vocational expert testimony. Howard was a sly fox. He knew the ins and outs and he knew how to be an effective witness.

Howard and I bonded over both of us being Jewish even though neither of us were religious. He once used a yiddish word: rachmones. It impressed me and it is funny because I always thought the word described him. Rachmones is a very Jewish word. It translates literally as “compassion”. It also has connotations of soulfulness and wisdom.

In his book, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten said this about rachmones:

“This quintessential word lies at the heart of Jewish thought and feeling. All of Judaism’s philosophy, ethics, learning, education, hierarchy of values, are enhanced with a sense of and heightened sensitivity to rachmones…”

Howard’s soulfulness was reflected in his music and his politics. I went to see him and his pal Jock Irvine (also a former hearing reporter at Social Security) play at Hermano’s restaurant in Concord. They could get down and play and they were frequent performers.

I was trying to convince Howard to leave Florida and return to New Hampshire. The combination of climate change superstorms and Florida’s far right politics was getting to him. He told me he was putting his condo in St. Petersburg on the market. He had told me about Fever Beach, a new novel by Carl Hiaasen. It is a very funny takedown of Florida’s right wing nuttiness. He and I both liked Hiaasen.

His plan to move north got short-circuited as time ran out. Howard knew the Granite State well, both the good and the bad. He had lived in Rochester NH before he moved to Concord. New Hampshire is such a small world that it turned out we both knew a long-time Rochester state representative, Sandy Keans. I had worked closely with Sandy when I had worked as the legal aid lobbyist in the NH state legislature.

Howard was a strong progressive. He suggested books for me including The Last Holiday A Memoir by Gil Scott Heron. We both loved Gil’s music and I reminisced with Howard about seeing Gil play in Boston. Howard was open-minded, anti-racist and anti-fascist.

Howard had vast musical knowledge and he was very supportive of young musicians. I used to send him videos of my son Josh playing and he was enthusiastic and encouraging.

It is very hard for me to accept that he is no longer with us. Howard died on June 3. Judge Eric Eklund, a former colleague of mine in Lawrence sent Howard this note:

“Howard I hope you remember me we did 100 cases together back when I was stationed in Lawrence. It was always a tremendous pleasure working with you. And I both enjoyed our conversations and our resolution of cases. Whether you believe it or not, I can still hear your voice in my ears as if we were in the courtroom just yesterday ….I want you to know that I will be thinking of you and it has been one of the joys of my professional life to work with you.”

Howard will be missed. As anyone who understands Social Security law knows, vocational experts play a critical role in hearings. Howard was a true public servant and he performed with distinction. He was both a great friend and colleague. He made a positive difference in this world.