Trump’s D.C. Crackdown Is the Logical Endpoint of the Post-9/11 Era

It’s worth noting that every single tool that Trump has employed in his effort to expand the state’s authoritarian reach is one that existed prior to his first term—and all of these tools have been bolstered over years on the strength of bipartisan consensus. What Trump is doing is not some unexpected misuse of the awesome capabilities and powers that we have granted to the military national security state, but rather its natural endpoint. Everything is working as it was designed to do. As the dedicated team at 404 Media has been exhaustively documenting for months, practically every public or private surveillance tool and authority that exists at every level of government has been tapped to prosecute the administration’s power grab in the final melding of a full-on authoritarian apparatus.

It is a marker of a continued failure to grasp this—or, perhaps, a refusal to do so—that journalists, commentators, and political figures are now litigating the exact severity and political response to the rates of crime in D.C. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is not fundamentally about crime, just as it was not about immigration; there is no level of public safety at which Trump would not have taken these steps because this is about power. Early reports of this deployment point to random checkpoints and patrols, indiscriminate arrests, and federal agents taking down banners criticizing them, as opposed to any actual investigative or policing work, surprising only the dumbest of pundits.

The point here isn’t to take a victory lap. Those of us who’ve been right about this are not particularly happy about the prescience we’ve manifested. The point is that we can’t establish a system in which all the incentives point in an authoritarian direction, and have few restraints and no consequences for abuse, then be shocked when we end up here. We are now staring down the barrel of a bona fide, definitional fascist takeover of the United States, and what remaining pro-democracy leaders and institutions we have need to be thinking hard about not only how to effectively stall out and countermand this movement while they still have some relative power but how to avoid the litany of failures that fed it.