Where Are We At Now?

My Assessment

When I wrote my original piece after the election and before Trump took office, I somewhat underestimated how rapid and extensive his power grabs would be. I very badly underestimated how incompetent he’d be at it. What Trump has in mind is clearly a consolidation of power on the model of Hungary’s Victor Orban; but he’s doing everything completely in the wrong order, and as ineptly as humanly possible.

In fact the speed with which he has moved, spreading himself thin on so many different fronts, is an indicator of his ineptitude.

A would-be strongman trying to consolidate power and establish a hybrid regime — if he is competent — will not gut the economy and threaten the livelihoods of a majority of the population. He will not do things that reduce his approval ratings to the upper thirties — a record low for a president seven months into his term. Donald Trump is not competent.

A considerable number of doomers respond to such observations with “polls don’t matter when you can declare martial law!” But you don’t attempt a total seizure of power by military force with a 38% approval rating unless you want a Euromaidan or Ceaucescu scenario.

And if you’re planning to use the military to consolidate power, you sure as hell don’t start out by systematically alienating a major portion of the troops with deployments they view as demeaning like Los Angeles or the Trump birthday parade — and especially not attempting ham-handed purges that insult your career officer corps’ professional sensibilities. Trump or Hegseth has replaced competent career officers in the Joint Chiefs, and the Director of DIA, with political hacks — in some cases on the recommendation of Laura Loomer. Hegseth himself is a bumbling, drunken oaf that Trump had a parasocial relationship with because of his Fox News show. His agenda consists basically of purging the military of “woke” officers, and replacing technical competence with a “warrior ethos” — a warmed-over version of the Red vs. Expert, but repeated viewings of 300 substituted for Mao’s Little Red Book.

I confess no small astonishment that Hegseth hasn’t attempted a purge of the middle ranks of field-grade officers, or made any effort to secure their loyalty. As Kathryn Brightbill noted:

Yeah, they’re moving so fast that they haven’t done the steps that people like Erdogan took to take over the military, so we’ve got a whole lot of career military leaders who absolutely are not going to go along with martial law orders….

Basically, if you’re going to use the military to quell civil unrest, you have to replace the entire leadership structure with your loyalists first, which they very much have not done.

Perhaps it’s because their political attitudes are too opaque to evaluate; perhaps he has no one on the inside who can reliably assess the loyalty of that number of people, or he’s fired so many competent staff people that there’s no one left capable of even processing that much information with sufficient granularity.

In any case, even if the entire military were fully reliable and willing to participate in an unconstitutional seizure of power, my initial post-election assessment — that the federal government lacks the necessary resources for martial law on a national scale, or even in more than a handful of cities at once — remains valid.

Regarding things like martial law, Greg Doucette is one of the best antidotes to doomer scenarios (much of the analysis below is based on these three threads). The fundamental consideration is that there are simply “not enough personnel to do martial law.” Government authority rests, ultimately, on the fact that “most people voluntarily follow most laws most of the time.” Or more colorfully: “The Government’s ability to govern rests almost entirely on a combination of the honor system and apathy.” If that state of affairs changes for a significant percentage, “things get overstretched very fast.”

Even in the case of military deployment against one major city, Los Angeles, Doucette writes:

LA has like 4M+ people. Sending every single ICE officer is ~20K, LAPD is 9K, LASD is 10K. Going in at 100:1 manpower – leaving zero bodies for literally anything else – is foolish

“But not all 4M Angelenos are protesting!” you say

Well yeah, but the Government doesn’t have the logistics to deploy 40K officers across 300K acres of land either….

And on the question of whether throwing in all available federal law enforcement resources would give them sufficient force for general pacification, he replied:

Not even close. FBI gets you another +13K…. Then there’s logistics. Where do that many cops eat / sleep / shit? Goes downhill fast

Not to mention coordination among thousands of officers across multiple agencies with their own personalities, protocols, and egos

Militia like the Proud Boys “only get you a few hundred extra bodies. And protestors are much more comfortable fighting back against them than they are against uniformed officers.”

The same is true, exponentially, for California as a whole or for the entire United States. In response to a doomer who raised the possibility of “invading” Blue States, arresting Democratic legislators and governors and installing “caretaker” replacements, Doucette replied:

CA is the same acreage and population as Iraq, with more areas of urban density. “Invading” literally can’t happen while still having enough bodies for NY. There are ~7400ish state-level elected officials. The logistics for imprisoning more than a fraction are LOLable

Do you know how much martial power was required to manage the conquered states after the Civil War?

The idea the federal government is going to replace Governors or state Supreme Courts is pure applesauce

Look at 2020 to see how many armed personnel it takes to control a city block for a few hours

Now multiply by all the blocks they’d need to pacify

Now multiply by 3, b/c you need 24/7 coverage and soldiers still sleep

Now house + feed + water + transport them all

Logistics always wins

You think the same generals who did nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq are going to occupy Los Angeles + NYC + Chicago + Seattle + Atlanta + Denver + DC + Minneapolis + Portland + etc etc etc?

Especially after Kegseth’s personnel cuts??

The same logistical hurdles and lack of state capacity apply, more generally, to any project of seizing and maintaining control over the civil machinery of state and local governments. Consider the scenario, so glibly voiced by many doomers, of the feds simply “taking over” elections.

Elections are run by the states, the military has no role in it

Even if the military did have a role in state-run elections, there isn’t enough military – not enough physical bodies – to make a difference

In response to the hypothetical of ICE officers being distributed among polling places to intimidate voters or election staff, he responded:

Not logistically possible IMO. There are several hundred precincts just in Charlotte NC alone, and that’s with only 1M people or so…

Not enough physical bodies to matter. It’s logistically no different than the failure to pacify Los Angeles…

I think some of y’all may be underestimating just how vast this place is, both in terms of people and acreage

And the states control essentially the entire election machinery; if they’re allowed to function at all, it will be virtually impossible to deal with the possibility of an undesirable outcome except through blatant nullification after the fact. I think everyone in Washington knows that if the states ignored Trump and conducted elections as they saw fit, and Trump somehow got the Supreme Court to throw out their votes, what happened the next day at the White House and Supreme Court building would make the Capitol on Jan. 6 look like a ghost town.

What’s more, special elections this year have shown an electorate with a Democratic lean of +15-20% compared to 2024. In that kind of environment, gerrymandering is next to useless, and the wave election may be too decisive to rig.

Gwen Snyder notes the home ground and defensive advantages of noncompliant Blue States against attempts to subdue them with Red State National Guards.

We’re a country with more guns than people.

And while reactionary right wingers are probably more likely to have guns stockpiled, it’s worth remembering that if they want totalitarian control at gunpoint… THEY would have to come to US

And these guys are afraid to take the fucking subway.

I cannot IMAGINE them trying to take and hold an urban center.

And those who might be that foolish… Well, they might have a lot of guns. But also, how many of those can you realistically wield at once

Likewise the psychological hurdles entailed in attempts to turn federal law enforcement, whose experience is entirely limited to retail enforcement in situations where they outnumber their targets, into an occupation force for an entire population.

ICE literally runs away if you’re mean to them, they are not gonna be Confederate supersoldiers when the time comes

Like 1000% they would shoot unarmed civilians (and have already tried) but they are not gonna take a bullet for that man.

And even if they were actually willing, they are not gonna be an elite fighting force.

The administration is not competent enough to make that happen

And none of this so far even touches on the question of malicious compliance or noncompliance by the military if they’re ordered to use large-scale force against the entire civilian population of a hostile urban center. In my opinion a significant number of officers would simply refuse to pass on orders to fire on a crowd of civilians, another significant number would passive-aggressively fail to receive the orders, and further significant numbers of soldiers in a full-blown martial law scenario would either refuse to fire on crowds of civilians or would just go AWOL and melt into the general population. It doesn’t take very large minorities of such people, distributed across all levels of command and in support functions like logistics and communications, for the cumulative effect to paralyze an organization and demoralize those who remain.

Aside from all that, there’s just not a whole lot that you can do with regular military forces. Because of their training, they’re virtually useless for retail law enforcement tasks like arrests. About all the regular military is good for, if deployed wholesale by a would-be despot consolidating power, is Budapest 1956 stuff — turning machine guns against entire crowds of people, turning the whole city to rubble, and tearing every major thoroughfare up with tanks. And as previously noted, they don’t even have the numbers to do that on a scale of more than a few cities. What’s more, if Trump were actually willing to try it, in one or more cities, regardless of what the doomers say, that would be the end of the fucking ballgame. The military would just disintegrate internally.

And in fact the Marines and National Guard proved to be next to useless in Los Angeles in June. The Trump administration deployed the equivalent of a brigade, at the cost of over $100 million, in response to one protest confined to an area of a few blocks in Los Angeles. Most of their activities amounted to one or another form of “support” for local police — much of it the moral equivalent of carrying around a cooler of Gatorade for the high school football team. And they were completely unprepared to handle the logistics of even that deployment, for all the reasons given by Doucette above.

The Guard is proving equally useless in DC. And it’s probably not great for morale that a significant number are assigned to the sort of tasks usually performed by county jail inmates, like picking up trash and mulching ornamental trees.

And as Robert Hubbell points out, most of Trump’s loudly trumpeted future National Guard deployment in Blue cities is just a rebranding of deployments actually already announced weeks ago, to carry out the same sort of administrative and logistical support that comprised most of the actual Guard activity in Los Angeles.

The Pentagon has been planning for several weeks to deploy National Guard troops from a dozen-plus red states to provide clerical, case management, and logistics support to ICE to handle its burgeoning backlog of detained immigrants….

Discussion about the current deployment began a few weeks ago as red state governors responded to Trump’s request for National Guard troops to assist in cities across the US. But that proposed deployment is (appropriately) limited in a way that would not violate the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act….

As of Sunday evening, those existing plans for case management, logistic support and clerical work have been converted by Trump into threats to “send troops” to various cities.

In the process of their deployment of the Marines and Guard, the Trump administration probably amped up the scale of protests in the Greater Los Angeles area itself and other major cities by an order of magnitude. Tom Homan complained of as much, saying that “protests in Los Angeles are complicating immigration raids, making them more ‘difficult’ and more ‘dangerous.’” One LA resident described the hostile environment in which ICE operated:

In the first Battle of Los Angeles, the good people of LA County have prevailed. We beat ICE back. It started a couple weeks ago. The ICE-watch notices slowed down from a river to stream, then to a trickle. The parks and playgrounds in the neighborhoods that had been empty showed signs of life, the age of the average street vendors started to rise and now, today, officially Los Angeles is back in action….

Why? Well, for starters, 300 ICE agents have been moved to Chicago, leaving only about 300 in LA County which is about what we had before Trump took office. Why are they leaving? Because LA made their jobs TOO FUCKING HARD. LA Organized. LA sat on corners outside Home Depots with radios. LA got on Signal and ICE-watch. LA’s biggest non-profit advocacy groups like the LA Tenants Union widened their missions to incorporate saving the whole fucking city. LA showed up. LA filmed. LA knew its rights and handed out red-cards at every opportunity. LA kept a small, peaceful, totally fucking irritating presence at the Federal buildings and LA showed up at the hotels where ICE was staying and made sure they didn’t get any sleep. LA Unions got involved. LA limousine liberals got out of their fucking limousines and stood watch on corners.

Public opposition and obstruction, more broadly, is creating a great deal of friction for the deportation effort. Airlines have been forced to resort to using dummy call signs for deportation flights and are blocking the planes’ tail numbers from tracking websites”; and even now, action groups have found “other ways to follow the flights, including by sharing information with other groups and using data from an open-source exchange that tracks aircraft transmissions.” Meanwhile, immigration activists have finally found something AI is good for: identifying masked ICE agents.

Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, estimates he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. He told POLITICO his experts are “able to reveal a face using AI, if they have 35 percent or more of the face visible.”…

ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on border management and the federal workforce.

Well, yes, Jim. Yes they do.

The public reaction in Washington, DC to the August deployment of ICE, the National Guard, and Trump’s challenge to local control, likewise, has significantly impeded deportation efforts. For example:

At approximately 5:40 pm ET on Tuesday, August 19th, Columbia Heights residents came together to drive out a group of ICE agents. It all took place within about 10 minutes around 14th Street and Irving Street. ICE agents got into their unmarked vehicles on Irving Street and drove off. There were 150+ DC residents.

Meanwhile, self-organized night patrols by DC residents are an ongoing headache for the invaders.

Armed only with cell phones, medical kits, and the confidence to assert their dwindling rights, groups of local residents trail and record Trump’s occupation forces. They’re known as the night patrols.

These night patrols watch over the city to ensure that people are protected from state violence, false arrest, abduction, and harassment. Failing that, their goal is to document the constitutional violations or brutality they witness, so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing. Their footage has gone viral and exposed the mainstream media’s lies about how happy DC residents are to see the South Carolina National Guard marching by their kid’s elementary school.

There is no centralized night-patrol planning committee. People in different groups don’t necessarily know each other, but everyone with whom we spoke was either experienced in this kind of work through previous cop-watch trainings or are compelled by what is happening to play their part in making sure the foot soldiers of the surveillance state know they too are being surveilled.

In Rochester, NY, protesters chased ICE away from an attempted roofing site raid. And electrical workers are training for job site defense in North Carolina.

As I already mentioned, ICE is used to retail operations — arresting individuals, or conducting individual workplace raids — without large-scale public attention or interference. The larger the scale of their sweeps in a given area, the more public awareness and opposition they generate. They are basically cowards who will retreat when outnumbered by a hostile crowd.

And they’re subject to serious personnel attrition, as a result of demoralization from new levels of public attention and hostility. It’s not what they signed up for. That’s why ICE is desperate to attract new recruits by waiving age limits, offering new perks, putting new people out on the street with even less training, and transferring people against their will from agencies like FEMA — and it’s still not working.

Administration officials meet the same palpable levels of public hatred when they step outside their bubbles. Vance, Hegseth and Miller attempted a public appearance, only to be met by hostile crowds shouting things like “Hey, it’s couch-fucker! Hey, buddy, you here to fuck a couch?”

The lack of state capacity we’ve noted so far in regard to national military resources applies even more strongly to Trump’s goal of subduing civil society.

Snyder comments, in the specific context of the recent court ruling against the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in Florida, on compulsive doomers whose response to every legal action, every court ruling, against the Trump administration is “It doesn’t matter. The courts don’t matter. The laws don’t matter. Trump will just ignore them.”

Folks, this is a ruling against DeSantis.

He can’t hide behind SCOTUS’ declaration of presidential immunity, he could face actual consequences.

Trump doesn’t like him, he’s a coward, there is plenty of likelihood he obeys.

Also: even the Trump admin obeys courts. Frequently….

Not feeling terribly patient with doomers who see a far right politician lose in court and immediately chide those of us who say it’s a positive development.

Courts got people back from CECOT.

They are still relevant.

They are still sometimes an effective mechanism against this administration.

Folks, obviously we do not put our faith in court rulings or treat them as things that will necessarily be obeyed.

But anything that tosses sand in their gears is a good thing, the whole game right now is slowing them down and making everything harder for them.

And I say “they” but again let’s remember that this is a DeSantis attempt at Trumpism.

The dude simply does not have the advantages Trump has when it comes to ignoring the courts. Or the cult, or even an assurance of a pardon if he tries and shit goes south for him legally

As I’ve repeatedly stressed, the courts’ lack of enforcement capability works both ways. It’s difficult to impossible to force Trump to comply with a court ruling on the legality of Executive Branch actions because possession is nine-tenths of the law. Executive officers are all in the direct chain of command under him. But the same rule applies, in the opposite direction, to Trump’s ability to enforce his “executive orders” outside the federal bureaucracy under his direct command. The states can simply respond “fuck you, make me,” and I doubt even this Supreme Court would enforce the EOs. And — again — there’s enough troops and federal LEOs to fully impose direct federal rule on maybe three major cities.

His lack of direct executive authority to enforce his commands on civil society actors like universities, media outlets, and big law firms, and on politically independent state and local governments, is to some extent compensated by his ability to threaten federal funding and/or abuse the justice system. But his success rate has been driven mostly by premature acquiescence rather than his actual capacity to inflict harm; and the works have been significantly gummed up by court challenges, and by actors like the universities and law firms that have refused to acquiesce. His ability to engage in lawfare is severely limited by the number of competent lawyers who have left the Justice Department, so that he can only go after a handful of targets at a time out of an immense target environment; grand juries are unlikely to be cooperative in most of these cases, as well. In fact Reason’s resident Schmittian and Trump bodypillow owner, Josh Blackman, clutched his pearls so hard his monocle popped off because grand juries thrice refused to indict someone who allegedly scratched a Gestapo agent’s hand. And it’s a pattern:

It is rare for a federal grand jury to decline to indict, but it’s become an emerging trend in Washington amid Trump’s federal crackdown, with grand juries made up of local residents declining to indict at least six times in recent weeks.

Last week, a grand jury declined to indict a former Justice Department employee, Sean Dunn, who was seen on video tossing a hoagie at the chest of one of the federal law enforcement officers patrolling the streets of Washington. Dunn has become a symbol of opposition to the federal takeover among D.C. residents, with Banksy-style art depicting a man tossing a sandwich appearing around the city.

A grand jury also declined to indict Alvin Summers with assault on a federal officer. And three federal grand juries refused to indict Sidney Lori Reid with assault during a scuffle with an FBI agent, and her charges were downgraded to a misdemeanor.

And as a stark a reminder to the Guard that everyone in DC hates them, a grand jury returned no true bill on someone accused of threatening them. Might be one reason for reports of widespread feelings of “shame” among the troops.

I should perhaps add a clarifying note on my repeated use of the word “doomers” in this piece. God knows there are enough legitimate reasons for dooming, even if Trump’s successful consolidation of power isn’t one of them. Even if his regime is unsustainable, he is doing things that endanger the livelihoods of broad swaths of the population, destroying social infrastructures that the most basic quality of life depends on, and inflicting incalculable harm and misery on the most vulnerable marginalized groups. But the damage he can do in the process of failing is indeed a scenario of doom.

What I mean by “doomers” is people whose reflexive, dogmatic response to any news of the courts, bureaucracy, or other procedural mechanisms challenging Trump, is to proclaim that “nothing matters, laws don’t matter any more, he’ll just ignore them, bold of you to assume there will be free elections in 2026, the protests and resistance are exactly what he’s hoping for as a pretext for martial law,” et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam, world without end, amen.

It’s safe to say Trump’s regime is unsustainable and his attempts to consolidate power will ultimately fail. But what happens instead? That’s a subject for Part II.