About That Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth...

Everything Seems Fine Until It Doesn't

My neighborhood in Washington, D.C. is a bucolic green slice of suburbia that looks like much of America. Walking through it this morning, you could see bleary-eyed men and women in matching Lululemon clothes walking their dogs, see families packing their kids off to school, and just around every gentle bend in the road, you could hear the soundtrack of American prosperity, a chorus of leaf blowers shrieking as they helped ensure none of my lawyer or government official neighbors had an out of place blade of grass on their front walkway.

And frankly, the whole spectacle gave me the creeps.

“Melancholia” Anyone?

Because if what I were witnessing was a scene from a movie, the audience would know that all this peaceful, comfortable, banality was foreshadowing some sort of doom—that we were living through that moment of blissful obliviousness that inevitably precedes catastrophe. And that is, it struck me, precisely what was happening here. And not just in my leafy green enclave but across America, wherever anyone might live, with or without leaf blowers.

Everyone was acting as though there were no great threat on the horizon. Everyone was behaving as though their lives might not be radically changed, upended, possibly worse, in the blinking of an eye. Here where I live, about four miles from the White House, it seemed that my neighbors just did not have a clue that life in America as they had known it all their lives could end in just a few months.

Or maybe they were in denial. It doesn’t matter. What was clear to me was that they seemed more inclined to accept whatever fate might hold than prepare for it—that our society might be doomed by apathy or the numbing effect of creature comforts or a collective failure to imagine how bad the dark future that may await us could be.

The asteroid Trump II was hurtling toward the planet and Americans who could do something about it were mowing their lawns.

Where Is Paul Revere When We Need Him?

It’s not just my neighbors, of course. Turn on the television and you hear about the current election campaign like it is just like any other with bland data mavens in khaki pants reporting on 2-3 point shifts in polling data as though it were a weather report…and as though the polls were accurate and mattered. Mainstream journalists seemed to be bending over backwards to describe candidate Trump and President Biden as though they were two pretty similar horses in a familiar horse race (when Trump is really more of a rabid three-legged hyena.)

Even Democratic activists that I know mouth platitudes and tell me that if Trump wins, we will make it hard for him to implement his agenda in the courts or the Congress or with vigorously written opeds.

And I just want to shout and shake them and say, AREN’T YOU PAYING ATTENTION? This is not business as usual! Democracy can effectively end in five months. There may not be another fair election in this country. Your neighbors could be dragged from their Range Rovers and hauled off to the slammer on the thinnest of pretenses. He and his supporters have promised concentration camps. They have promised to deport protestors whose views they don’t like. They have promised to throw their opponents in jail. He has promised to be a dictator from day one. He is desperate. His freedom depends on holding office and controlling the justice system. What is more he is an ally of our worst enemies and enemy of our best allies. He has already shown his contempt for our national security, stolen nuclear secrets, committed crimes. But sure, water your damn lawns!

Isn’t it worth entertaining the possibility that if elected Donald Trump and his fascist fellow-travelers will not honor court decisions that go against them or they will pack the courts and seek the venues that produce the decisions they want? That they will not show up for Congressional hearings? That they will create emergency pretexts to suspend elections or they will change election rules to ensure their side wins?

Isn’t it rational to conclude these things BECAUSE THEY ARE ALREADY HAPPENING? BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN PROMISED?

My neighborhood and every neighborhood in America need Paul Revere’s riding through them sounding the alarm. We need people to understand that gravity of the changes that are already being plotted by Trump and an extremist Supreme Court and the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and the Dominionists and other theocrats and the racists and the misogynists and their go along get along enablers in the brain dead, morals free, spineless, slavering, craven MAGA GOP.

And then, once awakened to those changes we need to determine both how to resist them at the polls and, at the same time—I repeat, at the same time because we do not have much time—prepare for the worst. Yes, America needs Democracy Doomsday Preppers, folks who figure out now how to resist, how to preserve our freedoms, how to push back even if the levers of power within the system are seized by lawless rogues who seek to gut our most important institutions. That will mean use all available legal means and it will mean flexing the power of those who want to fight for democracy in America by mass mobilizations, by active resistance from elected Democratic officials, by civil disobedience, by aggressive use of whatever media tools are available to us, by pressure from foreign governments that also care about democracy in the U.S.

How the Asteroid Can Win

So far, the signs that we may not be up to the fight that looms around the corner are not just that people are still barbecuing in their backyards.

We have seen that when the GOP goes scorched earth the Democratic party typically goes paws up, reverting to nonsense about “when they go low, we go high.” That didn’t work when the GOP and Trump sought to pack the Supreme Court. It didn’t work when GOP Congresspeople supported the January 6th coup and were not held accountable. It has not worked re: many of the serious charges against Trump as case after case is delayed and aggressive actions to push back against recalcitrant judges or ugly smear tactics (see Fulton County) have simply not been taken.

We have also seen that even though an astonishing array of those who worked in senior jobs for Trump have said they will not support him in the 2024 elections, the leadership of the Republican Party has prostrated itself before their rapist-traitor-felon candidate. They will do as he says (witness them blocking their own breakthrough immigration deal at his behest) so to expect an outbreak of character for them at any moment—especially after Trump is elected—is unrealistic.

What that means is that once Trump reclaims control of the US government and fires as he intends to all those who might resist him, it is highly unlikely that either of our two political parties or big chunks of our judicial system will actually be able to constrain him. It is certainly not something that we can count on.

The nightmare scenarios could easily come true and in rapid fashion. Team Trump has been in power before. They know the obstacles to advancing their agenda they faced then. Former senior Trump officials have confirmed for me their belief that the Trump inner circle have developed clear plans to rapidly implement their agenda without the need for Congressional action and without much concern for the courts. (“They’ll throw folks in jail first and worry about legalities later,” said one former Trump White House official to me this week.)

Within weeks of taking office the arrests and the deportations and the establishment of concentration camps and the firings and the attacks on opposition leaders and the media are likely to begin. Our allies around the world believe this too. For many of them, living with authoritarians is not an abstraction. They know it is possible. Indeed, they are taking very seriously discussions for what a NATO without the US would look like, how to defend Ukraine without the US, how to stand up to Russia if the US is on Moscow’s side explicitly or tacitly.

They are preparing. We should prepare.

But we also need to recognize that given our experience dealing with the asteroid after it has hit the earth is a losing strategy. We need to deflect it by the one reliable means at our disposal. In this case, that does not require Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck and a dicey space mission that defies the laws of physics to defend us.

All it requires is that this summer, we take a little time away from our lawns and our barbecues…take time every day…take time on the weekends when we might have been going to the beach or just chilling…and work to ensure that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are soundly defeated in November. Donate. Canvas. Campaign. Share your message on social media. Plan to drive people to vote.

Do it whether you love your local or national candidates or you don’t. Because on the ballot this November is not one candidate versus another. It is life on the planet as you have known it versus the asteroid. And the time we have to stop the asteroid is ticking away and the only way we can stop it is if each and every one of us makes an effort. No one is going to do it for us. This is one of those moments we have to look up from our quotidien lives, see the looming danger and recognize that it will take all of us working together to stop it.