You are not safe in Trump’s America. That’s the biggest difference between the first Trump administration and his second. This time around, President Donald Trump and his chief advisers are conducting themselves as though they have the right to do anything to anyone in the name of national security, with no factual justification necessary.
There’s no reason to believe ‘it can’t happen here’ as it’s already happening.
Whether you are a natural-born American Republican who worked in the Trump administration or a foreign-born pro-Palestinian student protester on a green card — anyone in this country, citizen or otherwise, can be deemed “bad people” by this government. And Trump is demonstrating that he will deploy the brute force of the most powerful office in the world on you, if he so chooses.
The continued survival of some of America’s most sacrosanct values — including due process, freedom of speech, and checks and balances on the executive branch — is not certain. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s no longer an abstract threat. There’s no reason to believe “it can’t happen here” as it’s already happening.
The second Trump administration will not be constrained by objective facts, the Constitution or a unanimous ruling by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, including three Trump appointees. This White House is beta testing a MAGA monarchy, one in which the president is beyond the rule of law.
One of the most facile arguments against the notion that Trump’s demagoguery uniquely threatens Americans’ basic freedoms and liberties is that the “institutions held” in his first term — ultimately preventing him from completing his attempted self-coup after losing the 2020 election. Now that he’s been re-elected and the Supreme Court has deemed the president essentially immune from prosecution for any “official acts,” it’s not at all clear that the institutions will hold in his second term.
Take the Supreme Court, of which Trump is currently in open defiance. The justices ordered his administration to take reasonable steps to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia — who the government has already admitted was mistakenly deported — to the United States. This week, Trump play-acted that he was incapable of ordering Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — whose government the U.S. is sending $6 million of taxpayer funds to imprison people taken from America without due process. Bukele, at the White House with Trump, said he wouldn’t return Garcia to U.S. custody, “The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”
As Bloomberg reported, about 90% of the alleged “terrorists” and “gang members” who’ve been sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious foreign prison without due process have no U.S. criminal record. Though many were deported based on purported “gang tattoos,” as the Miami Herald reported, the Venezuelan gang targeted by the administration doesn’t even use tattoos as self-identifiers. And yet, senior members of the Trump administration still insist without evidence that Garcia and every deported detainee are where they belong. (Again, the administration has already admitted Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error.”)
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the implication of the Trump administration’s position “is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.”
You have to wonder if the administration will simply make up a concept like ‘anti-American discrimination’ to target its critics.
Right on cue, the administration indicated it was looking for ways to do just that. In his White House meeting with Bukele on Monday, Trump explicitly said “homegrown criminals are next,” and his press secretary later confirmed he wasn’t joking. Add in the fact that acting ICE director Todd Lyons recently said the U.S. needs a deportation process that’s more like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings,” and you don’t have to stretch for historical comparisons to see where this is headed.
The Trump administration’s weaponization of executive power also includes an all-out assault on free speech.
The White House — again in defiance of a federal court order — continues to bar The Associated Press because the outlet wouldn’t use the administration’s preferred language to describe the body of water that most of the world calls the Gulf of Mexico. In a Truth Social tantrum this week over “60 Minutes” segments that he didn’t like, Trump beseeched Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to use the force of his office to punish CBS News and “60 Minutes” for “their unlawful and illegal behavior.”
ICE recently announced it will monitor immigrants’ social media accounts for “antisemitism.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on a State Department memo that found the administration had produced no evidence that Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk had supported antisemitism or terrorism — but days later masked ICE agents snatched her off a city street and sent her to a Louisiana detention center on that basis anyway. The administration’s assault on higher education now includes a demand for Harvard University to audit the political opinions of its students. And Trump’s State Department is reportedly encouraging its employees to snitch on each other — even anonymously — about supposed “anti-Christian bias,” which at the moment is so nebulously defined it could mean anything from support for LGBTQ rights or Covid vaccines.
And in a truly chilling abuse of power, President Trump last week also issued an executive order targeting Chris Krebs — who led the who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during Trump’s first administration — ordering the Justice Department to investigate Krebs on the grounds that he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
None of that is true, of course, and Krebs was one of the few people who put their careers — and personal safety — on the line by defying Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen. He was personally one of the “institutions” who held against Trump’s tyranny. Now Trump has turned the force of government on him, personally. (As someone who has written many articles stating the factual reality that Trump lost the 2020 election and attempted a self-coup to stay in power, I’m not naive to the possibility that a blanket EO targeting people like me could be in the future. You have to wonder if the administration will simply make up a concept like “anti-American discrimination” to target its critics.)
It’s clear that Trump’s second administration doesn’t do “trial balloons.” When they say they’re going to try something heretofore understood as illegal or unconstitutional — they’re going to try it anyway, and any one of us could be the next target. The lawlessness, lies and nearly limitless power of this administration are an existentially dangerous combination — and it’s plainly un-American.
