The #Section3 #Removal Plan: A(nother) Quick, Legal, and Nonviolent Way to End the Trump Regime
The country is under occupation by a lawless, vicious Gestapo. Our democracy is on life support. Donald's removal is not only possible; it is a moral necessity.
I. The Problem
It’s been just 53 weeks since Donald Trump—defying logic and statistical probability and U.S. history and exit polling and human decency and the very concept of American exceptionalism that was the thrust of his campaign—swept all seven swing states and won the 2024 election. Since his “restoration” a year ago, much of the odious Project 2025 agenda has been installed, with emphasis on racist policies that promote straight white male supremacy; six corrupt Supreme Court Justices have bequeathed him near-unlimited power; legacy media, many colleges and universities, most white-shoe law firms, and too many wealthy elites have capitulated to his will; and, as evidenced in Minneapolis, where Trump’s ICE Gestapo is openly executing innocent people in the streets with impunity, the country has lurched closer and closer to full-blown authoritarianism. Not since 1860 has the future of our democracy been so rickety.
Bill of Rights, you say? The Trump regime has effectively quashed the First, Second, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments; brazenly announced it will ignore the Twenty-Second; and wants to also dispose of the Eighth, the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth, and, oh yes, the Nineteenth.
And for what? The tariffs are a disaster. Everything is more expensive than it was 12 months ago. The economy is a trompe l’oeil of computer-generated slop, propped up by an AI bubble that even ChatGPT must know will burst any minute now. Our country—not just Minnesota—is being terrorized by a state secret police that abducts our residents, sprays teargas in the face of peaceful protestors, kidnaps—literally kidnaps—children as young as five two, and guns down peaceful, law-abiding citizens willy-nilly. The Department of Justice has become the Department of Retribution. Miller and Hegseth want to send U.S. troops into U.S. cities and are itching to invoke the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, Donald and his family have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars and counting; in the last calendar year, the President—who is prohibited by law from profiting from the office, not that anybody cares—has personally raked in $1,400,000,000. In one year!
Our standing in the world has cratered along with the dollar. We’ve burned bridges with all of our allies—no, that’s too soft; we’ve dropped atomic bombs on bridges with all of our allies, not only incinerating the bridges but also making the crossings radioactive for the rest of the lifetimes of everyone old enough to read this—and further cozied up to Moscow, where Trump’s son-in-law and old real estate crony were recently seen art-of-the-dealing. (Is it Trump Tower Gaza City they’re after? The Trump Mariupol Resort & Country Club?) NATO allies have stopped sharing intelligence with us—possibly for good. The United States was once a mighty champion of democracy that locked horns with despotic regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan; now the despotic regime is our own. Our military is blowing up Caribbean fishing boats small enough for me to own and kidnapping world leaders the president doesn’t like, while our Commander-in-Chief bows before the puny, Botox’d Russian strongman unleashing human safari on our (former?) democratic allies in Ukraine. In the Middle East, Trump fervently and unequivocally supports a criminal regime openly committing genocide, and is so miffed at not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize that he keeps threatening to “take” Greenland, a move that would be existentially awful for everyone involved.
So much bad has happened that I keep forgetting he had a demolition crew raze the historic East Wing of the White House, after assuring us that wasn’t part of the design plan, to make way for the architectural monstrosity that only he seems to want; this, after gilding the Oval Office like it’s some two-bit whorehouse—which, given its current occupant, it kinda sorta is.
It’s a shit-show. This past week, Trump was in Davos, humiliating himself and the country, rambling on incoherently during an interminable “speech,” insulting the valor of British soldiers who fought with us in Afghanistan, and indignantly telling the Europeans that if it weren’t for the good ol’ US-of-A, they’d all be speaking German—which, in Switzerland, where Davos happens to be located, is the language that’s spoken. His “Board of Peace,” meanwhile—a name so obviously doublespeak that even George Orwell would be like, “Dude, that’s too much”—features the odious likes of Putin and Bibi, two serial war criminals, among other dictators, despots, and strongmen. And Donald is their chairman!
This is what we’ve become.
Worst of all, there’s no obvious way out of this. The midterms are three trimesters away. The Trump regime has already taken drastic steps to ensure that future elections will not be on the up and up—and will continue to do so. And the opposition party, so called, seems to believe that everything will magically revert back to normal if we just send Act Blue five dollars. There is plenty of spectacle in DC, but no real urgency. We’ve seen true heroism and leadership on the ground in Chicago, in Portland, and especially in Minneapolis. We’ve seen a handful of elected officials standing up for what’s right. Mamdani has been a revelation. But the Democratic leadership is both sclerotic and out of touch. Chuck Schumer seems trapped in a bygone era, like he was sucked into the TV during the Stranger Things finale. Hakeem Jeffries couldn’t even get all the House Dems to nix the ICE budget request—which, like, I’m no fascism scholar, but it seems to me that the first step in defeating Nazi activity is to stop funding it.
At the rate things are going, our democracy may not survive nine more months of this sustained demolition, let alone three more years.
Millions of us around the country have come out at various protests in defiance of Trump and his regime. But what, exactly, are we asking for? We say NO to kings, but what do we say YES to? What are our demands?
What we want is for them—all of them, not just Donald—to GTFO.
That’s a tall order. How do we get out of this mess?
It’s tricky. Even if we somehow impeach and remove Donald Trump, JD Vance would be president. We’d be out of the pussy-grabbing frying pan, into the couch-on-fire. Is his ascension even an improvement? Even among the seemingly endless parade of obnoxious shitheads in the Trump Administration, the VP stands out as singularly vile.
Furthermore, all of the inept, soulless ghouls who comprise the current Cabinet would remain: Bondi at the DOJ, Hegseth at Defense, RFK, Jr. at HHS, Rubio at State, Gabbard at DNI, Noem at DHS, and so on. We’re one more pandemic away from half the country dying because the whale-beheading fraud in charge of our public health system knows less about medicine than Steve Martin in that old “Who’s the Barber?” sketch. We can’t afford to sit on our hands. It’s now or never.
Complicating matters is that the list of presidential succession is brutal and bleak:
Vice President (JD Vance)
Speaker of the House (Mike Johnson)
President Pro Tempore of the Senate (decrepit traitor Chuck Grassley)
Secretary of State (Marco Rubio—once a “good” Republican but now a war criminal and hardcore fascist)
Secretary of the Treasury (liar Scott Bessent, last seen encouraging residents of Alberta to secede from Canada)
Secretary of Defense (inept drunk Pete Hegseth)
Attorney General (abusive asshole Pam Bondi)
Do we want any of those heartless monsters sitting behind the Resolute Desk?
For months, I wracked my brain, trying to devise a realistic exit strategy. In October, I proposed one—the #Liz48 plan. It presented a viable way out—a roadmap back to normalcy.
And a lot of people liked it. It’s the most popular post in the history of PREVAIL.
As I wrote back then:
For now, this can be filed under the “ideas Greg has that sound great in theory but will never happen IRL,” along with my piece on “Dark Brandon Godfather Moves.” Whatever. I understand that #Liz48 is closer to “pipe dream” than “way out.” I also understand that this plan is not perfect.
But it’s a plan that would work, under current U.S. law. It’s a way out—a legitimate, Constitutional way out.
From the many respondents to my #Liz48 plan, I heard three main criticisms:
“I don’t trust Liz Cheney.”
“The Senate will never impeach Trump.”
“This will never happen.”
With regards to #3, my response is, “If I had told you back in January 2013, as Barack Obama took the oath of office for the second time, that within 15 years not just our democracy but the entire rules-based international order would be destroyed in service to a crude, gross, hateful, racist, mobbed-up child-sex-trafficking apologist and serial sexual assailant in league with the Kremlin who smelled like rotten roast beef, you would have said the same thing.”
As for the first point, I mean, who would you rather have as president right now, Liz Cheney or Trump? But if it must be someone else, how about Jerome Powell? He’s clearly anti-Trump, everyone seems to like him, he’s smart and capable and apolitical, and he wouldn’t spend his time in office running for re-election. I look at the Canadians and see Mark Carney; I’ll have what they’re having!
But the second point is, I concede, perhaps an insurmountable problem. There are simply too many GOP traitors in the Senate. Even now, I don’t know if we’d get the two-thirds needed to impeach. Heck, it’s even odds John Fetterman—who looks and behaves more like a pro wrestling heel than a senator—would defect and vote with the Republicans.
Happily, there is another, even faster, way. . .
II. The (Alternative) Solution
Before I go into the details, I should make clear that what I am about to propose is not my idea.
As far as I can tell, it was first suggested by two conservative legal scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” a 700-page analysis published in February 2024 by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
I first heard of it from Kaitlyn Byrd—GothamGirlBlue—in her brilliant piece, “Sunday Reading List: The 14th Amendment Still Exists,” published on November 24, 2024. I included her idea in my proposed “Dark Brandon Godfather Moves” a few weeks later.
I wrote:
The Senate Democrats need to stop Chuck Schumering already and make this happen. Do exactly what Byrd suggests! There’s absolutely nothing to lose—other than, you know, American democracy.
Needless to say, the Senate Democrats did not, and have not, stopped Chuck Schumering. And in a related story, American democracy is on life support.
A Little History
In the days after the Civil War, some of the Southern states wanted to send back to Washington elected officials who’d been active participants in the Confederacy. The Union was loath to let bygones be bygones and allow every last traitor back into the Capitol. So Congress wrote a codicil into the Fourteenth Amendment, granting itself the right to determine, on a case by case basis, whether a former Confederate could return to the fold. This is Section 3, aka the Disqualification Clause:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
So let’s say I’m Cletus Mitchell, a former Confederate officer from Mobile, and that the people of Alabama have elected me to the Senate in 1868. Because of my affiliation with the insurrectionists, I’m not legally allowed to serve unless two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate give their blessing.
That’s a tall order, to be sure—and it should be, because we’re talking about a bunch of stinking traitors. But in many cases, people like Cletus Mitchell did get the requisite votes and were able to take their seats.
This law is still very much on the books. And it is not exclusive to Civil War leaders. It means that anyone who engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States and the United States Constitution is forbidden from holding a federal political office unless they get special permission.
Donald Trump, you may recall, led an insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump, you may also recall, was not authorized by a two-thirds vote in either chamber to “remove such disability.” Which means that Donald Trump is not, and has not been since two weeks before he left office the first time, eligible to serve as POTUS.
Admittedly, I did not go to law school and am not an attorney. So don’t take my word for it; listen instead to Baude and Paulsen (boldface mine):
The core events [surrounding efforts to overturn the result of the presidential election of 2020] are familiar to all—the dishonest attempts to set aside valid state election results with false claims of voter fraud; the attempted subversion of the constitutional processes for States’ selection of electors for President and Vice President; the efforts to have the Vice President unconstitutionally claim a power to refuse to count electoral votes certified and submitted by several States; the efforts of Members of Congress to assert a similar power to reject votes lawfully cast by electors; the fomenting and immediate incitement of a mob to attempt to forcibly prevent Congress’s and the Vice President’s counting of such lawfully cast votes—all in an attempt to prevent the defeated incumbent President, Donald Trump, from losing power in accordance with the Constitution. This was undoubtedly a serious assault on the American constitutional order. Not since the Civil War has there been so serious a threat to the foundations of the American constitutional republic. It takes little imagination to describe the efforts to maintain Trump in office, notwithstanding his defeat, as an attempted political coup d’état. These actions culminated in the incitement and execution of a violent uprising at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—an “insurrection” aimed at preventing Congress and the incumbent Vice President from performing their constitutional responsibilities to count the votes for President and Vice President in the 2020 election. Several of the people involved in these events—most notably, the defeated President, Donald Trump—had previously taken oaths to support the Constitution. If they engaged in or gave aid and comfort to an insurrection against the constitutional government, Section Three would appear to bar them from holding office again.
The Colorado Supreme Court agreed with this assessment, ordering the Colorado Secretary of State to remove Trump’s name from the 2024 ballots, on the grounds that he was ineligible. This made Donald throw the ketchup. A legal battle ensued. The case was fast-tracked to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in its March 2024 Trump v. Anderson decision, unanimously reversed the ruling—but not for the usual cowardly, corrupt John Roberts reasons:
A group of Colorado voters contends that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits former President Donald J. Trump, who seeks the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party in this year’s election, from becoming President again. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed with that contention. It ordered the Colorado secretary of state to exclude the former President from the Republican primary ballot in the State and to disregard any write-in votes that Colorado voters might cast for him.
Former President Trump challenges that decision on several grounds. Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.
Basically, SCOTUS let Trump off on a technicality:
This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.
Which, okay, fine, whatever.
There is a lot of chatter in the Trump v. Anderson decision about legal precedent, about the Enforcement Act of 1870, about the delineation of what powers belong to a state and what powers belong to the federal government, and about—as Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson explain in their concurrence—“novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner”—that is, Donald Trump—“from future controversy.”
But nowhere does the Court say, or even suggest, that Donald Trump is not guilty of insurrection against the United States. To the contrary. As Byrd notes,
the Court was presented an argument for innocence in the Trump v. Anderson case where they made up their very terrible rules. Trump’s lawyers argued that Section 3 does not apply. The Court did not even touch it. The key aspect of the entire decision, in fact, supports the idea that Section 3 is valid and does apply, and as such, states cannot implement any efforts to enforce it. That’s for Congress alone to determine.
Roberts and Alito and Thomas are the same goose-stepping bootlickers who gave Donald absolute immunity for “official acts.” If they could have gotten away with declaring Trump innocent of leading an insurrection, don’t you think they would have done so? Justice Fond-of-Flags and Justice My-Wife-Helped-Finance-J6? Instead, they didn’t even try.
Neither did Congress proclaim Trump’s innocence during the second impeachment. As Byrd argues,
Congress already determined that Trump was an insurrectionist disqualified from the ballot — via impeachment.
It went so quickly that few of us remember what happened; I still have to pull up the videos on CSPAN to catch up myself. But bipartisan majorities in both chambers agreed that Donald Trump had incited an insurrection. It fell short of impeachment, itself a 2/3 majority limit in the Senate, but that’s not the rule, is it? It’s that Congress agrees as a body that an officer of the United States has engaged in insurrection and is disqualified to hold any future office. And in that sense, the impeachment and the trial vote do precisely that.
But wait! There’s more! She continues:
None of the defenses offered for the “not guilty” votes were that Donald Trump was innocent. There was the fact that he was no longer in office; there were questions about the Constitutionality of the Senate trial; there were calls for him to face criminal charges instead of political ones; there were people who said that the trial was a distraction from important pandemic response. But every single Republican Senator agreed that the events of January 6th were an insurrection. The only question was whether they would (or could) hold Trump accountable for it.
Needless to say, they did not hold him accountable, because the Senate GOP is nothing but a sorry lot of poltroons and traitors more suited to serve in the Ninth Circle of Hell than the Capitol.
The Amnesty Bill
The way out, then, is, at least in theory, simple:
Both House and Senate draft a bill to offer Donald Trump amnesty—to “remove such disability” of his having instigated a violent insurrection—as mandated by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Bring the bill to a vote.
Trump fails to secure the requisite two-thirds majority vote.
Trump is declared ineligible to serve as the President of the United States and must vacate the White House.
Kaitlyn Byrd proposed this three weeks after the 2024 election, well before Inauguration Day. I highlighted her idea in early December 2024.
At that time, the Democrats still held the Senate. So if Chuck Schumer had merely put this to a vote, Trump’s petition for amnesty would have failed, and he would have been formally, legally ineligible to be the 47th President. (As I understand it, he has to win two-thirds in both chambers to be eligible for the office, so even if just the Senate said no, that would have been the end of it.) You know, just in case you needed another reason to despise Chuck Schumer.
And yeah, the Supreme Court would have weighed in and decided that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say what Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly says; indeed, the six traitors on the Court already laid the groundwork for that in Trump v. Anderson. Roberts would have written some Bush v. Gore 2.0 granting Trump the office anyway. And even if he didn’t, JD Vance was duly elected, so he would have been sworn in on January 20, 2025. Yuck.
Furthermore, the nation really was pretty evenly divided 14 months ago, so Trump’s disqualification might have caused public unrest when Biden’s DOJ tried to enforce the law. (Enforcement of any law that might result in Trump’s removal will always be difficult to enforce.)
But it was worth a try! And Chuck Schumer didn’t, and still doesn’t, try.
(Note the difference between pusillanimous Senator and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who said in his inaugural address, “Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.” The last three words in the Andor Manifesto are: “Remember this: Try.”)
The silver lining is, we can try right now. Indeed, public appetite for doing so is much greater than it was last December—especially this week, in the wake of the horrible ICE executions in Minneapolis. Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet. And we can throw in a few curveballs, to help us end this dark period in American history once and for all.
As I discussed in the #Liz48 piece, it would make the transition a lot smoother if we could first replace Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House with the individual who would ultimately succeed Trump in the White House: Liz Cheney, Jerome Powell, Mark Kelly, Andy Beshear, Bruce Springsteen, whoever. But it’s not a pre-requisite, so we can skip it for now.
Here’s what we do, in six steps of increasing difficulty:
1/ Draft the Amnesty Bill
This must happen in both the House and the Senate. And that’s easy, because there’s nothing stopping any Democratic lawmaker from doing so. But here’s the catch: the bill should offer amnesty to Donald Trump and to JD Vance and to Mike Johnson—under the argument that, by knowingly abetting the administration of an ineligible insurrectionist, who is continuing the J6 insurrection by his illegal occupation of Minnesota, Vance and Johnson have “given aid or comfort to the enemies,” and thus also require Congressional sanction to “remove such disability.”
(Is the inclusion of Vance and Johnson a bit flimsy, legally? Sure. But so is almost everything Trump has done since 2016. And it’s necessary for now.)
2/ Vote on the Amnesty Bill
This is the hardest part. The bill must make it to the floor. I don’t know how to make that happen—the byzantine workings of parliamentary procedure are all Greek to me—but I’m sure the Jamie Raskins and Adam Schiffs can figure it out. If Massie and Khanna can get the House to vote on the Epstein Bill, they can do this.
3/ Deny Trump, Vance, and Johnson amnesty.
They won’t get the requisite two-thirds majority. So as soon as the final tally is in, poof, none of these traitors will be in office. It’s instantaneous. Now you see ‘em, now you don’t. Trump is no longer the president, Vance is no longer the vice president, and Johnson has to fuck all the way off to Louisiana, where he can finally open a bank account and find another 15-year-old kid to “adopt.”
4/ Immediately after, elect a new Speaker.
As mentioned, it would be helpful to have someone in mind, a consensus candidate, beforehand. But even that isn’t totally necessary, as long as someone is voted in, quickly, who isn’t a mob-money-laundering friend to child sex traffickers loyal to Putin. I don’t think the Founders would have objected to having members of the House hash this out.
Right after being formally made Speaker, the consensus candidate is immediately sworn in as our 48th President. The new POTUS immediately fires the entire Trump Cabinet, the entire Trump White House staff, and anyone directly tied to the corrupt regime.
5/ Navigate the chaos.
If this comes to pass, Trump will go ballistic. He will scream bloody murder, yowl for the Supreme Court to save him, order an invasion of Nuuk or a nuclear strike on Tehran. And his lickspittles—Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, Little Marco—will tell him that he’s still in charge.
But he won’t be. At that point, the Joint Chiefs would be under no obligation to follow orders from him, from Pete Hegseth, or from Pete Hegseth’s wife. Not only that, but if Trump makes like his criminal buddy Bibi at Beit Aghion and refuses to leave the White House, the generals can literally call in the Delta Force to Maduro him.
Because at that point, Trump would have no more right to be in the Oval Office than you or I. And how can he even argue? If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that, when it comes to matters involving the eviction of squatters, he’s staunchly pro-landlord.
Vance, too, will grouse about how he is the rightful successor, because he’s not an insurrectionist, blah blah blah. His supporters will gather round him—but there’s so few of them, they can comfortably fit on the sectional display in the showroom of your local Raymour & Flanigan. The only U.S. residents lobbying hard for Vance will be the Widow Kirk, sweaty fascist Peter Thiel, Dark Enlightenment guru Curtis Yarvin, and maybe another stray Nazi or three. So: au revoir, baiseur de la canapé.
The important thing here is: Popular opinion will be on our side—resoundingly. The American people hate these schmucks. We’re embarrassed by them. We’re sick to death of them. We want them gone. There will be neither general strikes nor mass protests if Trump is declared ineligible, I assure you. They only thing people will be doing in the street is dancing.
And that’s vital.
The Berlin Wall didn’t fall because the head of the East German government signed some big law authorizing it; it fell because enough people wanted it to fall, so when a low-level functionary on the scene gave his consent, it was too late to stop it from coming down.
Bush v. Gore wasn’t a good ruling, in terms of legal precedent. Rehnquist & Co. pulled it out of their collective ass, basically. Bush became president because enough Americans, Gore included, decided that the Supreme Court’s decision was legit.
Legitimacy is everything.
“The regime will fall when it loses legitimacy, which happens when people withdraw their legitimacy from it,” says the organizer Jake Schlachter, co-founder of the Democracy Teams Initiative. “If a large majority of independents demands removal, I think there’s a good chance it happens. What is stopping people from demanding removal now is believing that it’s impossible.”
I’m here to tell you: it’s not impossible.
If Congress buys in, and the military buys in, and the governors of the blue states and some of the red ones buy in, and the creative community buys in, and (enough of) the legacy media buys in, and the American people visibly and clearly buy in, no one’s going to listen to the Supreme Court when they finally get around to hearing the case next term and start clucking about the weird rules they made up and inserted into Trump v. Anderson or “well-actually”-ing about Vance. If SCOTUS issues a decision in the forest, and no one bothers to listen, does it still make a noise?
But the Court wouldn’t dare reverse it. Not at that point. Roberts may be a fascist white supremacist anti-voting-rights asshole, but he’s also a coward who wants to keep his job. He caved on Obamacare, when he saw which way the wind was blowing; he’ll cave on this.
6/ Stop the bleeding.
The new president has to hurriedly undo as much of the Donald damage as possible, before the totalitarian cancer spreads even further.
Abolish ICE. Make Jack Smith Attorney General. Send military aid to Ukraine, call up the European leaders and beg for forgiveness, discombobulate the Kremlin—and the next time Bibi Netanyahu shows his smug-ass face on U.S. soil, arrest that butcher and send him to The Hague.
Hire a special counsel to hold Nuremberg-style trials to sort through the criminality of Trump and his cronies. Enact legislation to make sure nothing like this ever happens here again. Celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary with dignity, honor, and pride.
And . . . scene.
End Notes
I get that this is unlikely to happen. I get that there are elements of the plan that would require a great deal of creativity, courage, and luck. I get that some of it is legally murky. I get that things are more likely to get worse before they get better.
I get all that, so miss me with the naysaying. See a flaw in the plan? Suggest a fix. Think your Congressional representatives won’t go for it? Light up the switchboard and demand it. Convinced it will never work? Propose a better solution.
President TACO seems to have caved, for the moment, on Minnesota—like he did on Greenland. Bovino and his Nazi overcoat are on the way out. And the Super Bowl is in two weeks. There will be great temptation to assume everything’s back to normal now—that we can just roll up our sleeves for the midterms, send Chuck Schumer five bucks, and the ship will right itself.
Don’t be fooled by magical thinking. This is a lull in the storm, and nothing more. The encroachment on our rights has not stopped. As soon as he can, Trump will dispatch his ICE goons to some other city, hoping to activate the Insurrection Act. He will continue to saber-rattle about taking Greenland until he orders the military to do it—destroying the U.S. economy and the Westphalian order in the process. He hasn’t stopped building concentration camps. He hasn’t stopped the lawfare. He hasn’t stopped telling auto workers to fuck off. He hasn’t stopped his attempts to subvert the vote. And even if he loses in 2028, or is impeached before that, he has no plans to leave the White House. He can’t leave, because if he leaves—as Steve Bannon correctly assessed—a lot of people in the regime will go to prison, including Donald.
Trump’s a wannabe strongman, a mobster in league with the Kremlin and with the world’s most notorious child sex traffickers, and that will never change. He’s going to keep pushing until he has absolute power—or until we stop him.
We may have won this battle, but the war is far from over. And the reality is, we’re almost out of time.
As American Fascism author Brynn Tannehill—who taught me about Project 2025 in December 2023, and who has been shouting from the rooftops about the impending Trump dictatorship for years—writes at the Byline Times:
The Republican Party is increasingly behaving like a party that believes it will never face a competitive election again, which I believe is exactly what is happening. The administration increasingly doubles down on unpopular policies and positions, including defending young Republican leaders who got caught admiring Hitler and looking forward to gassing and burning the bodies of their political opponents.
Trump is deep underwater in opinion polls across most of his signature issues, including tariffs, the economy, and immigration. Yet Republican leadership seems to assume they have the capability to decide Presidential elections in perpetuity, regardless of how people vote….
When you run a step-by-step analysis of what it takes to decide who is President, it rapidly becomes obvious that a great many things must happen for the process to evade subversion. Republicans have set things up such that it is nearly impossible for everything to go the way it was intended, and instead the process of selecting a President is almost guaranteed to be successfully corrupted in favour of the Republican party.
The sun is setting on our democracy. There’s not much daylight left. This is the moment to be bold—or there will be nothing left but the darkness.
Photo credit: Johann Baptist Zimmermann. Ianua coeli (Gate of Heaven) at Maria Brünnlein church in Germany. Trumps at 9/11 ceremony, via National Archives.
I’m with you Greg! Enough IS ENOUGH! I was done with this trump regime early on his first time in the Oval office. Never voted for him, as growing up in NYC & Connecticut, we knew what that family was about & it wasn't God or country. It was always, “show me the money” with that family. How he even was elected the 2nd time is up for debate. Elon, want to shed a little light on that? After all, trump said supposedly on election day, that you really know a lot about those voting machines. And he always tells on himself in some fashion.
It’s TUESDAY🎉Get on those phones, folks, and let Senators know they MUST NOT CAVE this time! Schumer, Fetterman, Shaheen, Hassan, Angus King. Then call your Republican Senators and let them know how you feel. Five Calls app is great resource.