It's Not Just

We’ll never know exactly when it happened, or what the exact precipitating event was, but historians may well come to see January 2026 as the month that the United States tipped into a civil war.

It isn’t just the Department of Homeland Security’s murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, fresh on the heels of dozens of other government murders or deaths through negligence since last year.

It isn’t just the DHS’s refusal to identify the cold-blooded killers of Alex Pretti or to cooperate with Minnesota and Milwaukee law enforcement in investigating their crimes.

It isn’t just the military’s kidnap of a foreign head of state and his wife, or the US Coast Guard’s abduction of sailors from the streets of Great Britain in brazen violation of a court order and international law.

It isn’t just the arrest of four journalists—all people of color—in a transparent effort to intimidate journalists and undercut the First Amendment generally.

It isn’t just White House officials claiming that the Second Amendment is more limited than even most gun-control activists argue.

It isn’t just the exposure of a secret internal DHS memo encouraging its agents to violate the Fourth Amendment, which they have done on camera, as in the case of US citizen ChongLy Thao.

It isn’t just the government’s refusal to abide by the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

It isn’t just the administration’s grotesque “offers” to withdraw DHS from Minnesota and Maine in exchange for those states’ handing over their voter rolls. This violates the Tenth Amendment, which holds that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

It isn’t just the FBI’s raid on the Fulton County election office in Georgia in pursuit of proof of the fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen. Together with efforts to get states’ voter information, the Trump administration seeks to violate the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing that “The right of citizens of the United States shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It’s not just DHS using five-year-children as bait to snatch their parents.

It’s not just Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, because the Kingdom of Norway didn’t give him a Nobel Prize, which is controlled by a non-governmental committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, according to the terms of the estate of Alfred Nobel, a Swede.

It’s not just the realization that the Trump administration and its supporters delight in the chaos they hope to unleash.

It’s not just the expanding awareness that Trump is seeking to create a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich—or that whatever the Trump administration does…It’s Not Just.

This conflict is still relatively low-grade, and the government holds the monopoly of violence for now. But something has shifted. The national mood is sullen as dry blood.

The ship of state could be righted with the merest effort and awareness on the part of those politicians who all but beg us for our votes.

I tremble with rage to think of the bloodshed members of Congress could have already prevented—to say nothing of the future bloodshed they could forestall—if they didn’t temporize while the lives of so many of us hang in the balance.

The Democratic leadership in Congress is woefully under-prepared for this moment. There are promising successors in the wings if only Schumer, Jeffries, and other Congressional weaklings would step aside for the good of the country.

And of course, there is no Republican leadership in Congress at all, only followers. And that is how we got to this point. This—this chaos and precipitous slide into antidemocracy…. Republicans own this treachery lock, stock, and barrel.