In the nine months since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the overall goals of his agenda have become clear enough: weaken the United States abroad to create an environment friendly to dictators, while using the U.S. government and armed forces to establish a dictatorship at home. Will it work?
The success of Trump’s plan depends on how we see it, or rather, whether we choose not to see it. In the worst case, Americans choose not to notice, look away as their neighbors and coworkers are swept up in immigration raids and their cities become militarized and then pretend that they had no other choice but to abandon democracy.
Pretexts will be found. They already are, most obviously in the drumbeat of lies about urban crime and — as we have seen in the aftermath of the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — the selective exploitation of political violence.
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